Ireland president visits Seattle on trade mission

President Mary McAleese of Ireland, visiting Seattle as head of a high-tech trade mission, yesterday presented a blueprint for how her country transformed itself into a modern success story within a single generation.

"We had no natural resources but the brainpower of our people," McAleese said in a visit with The Seattle Times editorial board. "That's where the investment was made."

The visiting trade mission included representatives from about 30 Irish information-technology, telecommunications and aerospace companies. Between engagements in Seattle, McAleese spent an hour with the editorial board, accompanied by Irish ambassador Noel Fahey and trade minister Michael Ahern.

A former law professor and journalist, McAleese seemed to embody the transformed nation she leads.

She spoke rapidly and passionately, using the language of business and globalization, citing historical perspective and at one point the poetry of Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney.

Formerly one of the poorest nations in Europe, Ireland was noted for the waves of emigrants who left its shore, many of them for America.

Today, Ireland is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, the Celtic Tiger — a bastion of high-tech with full employment and net immigration.

The keys to that achievement, said McAleese, were Ireland's ability to entice multinational business investment with tax breaks and an intense focus on science and technology in secondary education.

Ireland's entry into the European Common Market (now the European Union) — and the resulting huge market that opened up — cemented the success.

McAleese was unflinching in describing the culture of old Ireland that persisted into the late 1960s. She said it was a "narrow, inward-looking" society that was "protectionist in our nature and in our culture."

The first industrial revolution, she said, had essentially bypassed Ireland. But the high-tech revolution would not.

U.S. companies were in the forefront of the transformation. Microsoft invested heavily there 20 years ago.

Since then, U.S. success in Ireland has grown steadily. Today, 100,000 people work for U.S. companies in Ireland.

As Ireland has prospered, the investment has become two-way — more than 65,000 people in the United States now work for Irish companies, McAleese said.

The economic changes in Ireland brought profound cultural change. Quoting Heaney, McAleese described old cultural mores thrust aside by young, ambitious Irish people with "intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars."

As Irish officials sat around conference tables discussing trade matters with their British peers, they shucked off generations of what McAleese called a "post-colonial malaise."

Treating the British no longer as oppressors, but equal partners, the Irish forged what McAleese described as "a formidable friendship" with its nearest neighbor.

Again, McAleese's presidency illustrates that shift. She was born in a Catholic ghetto area of Belfast in British-ruled Northern Ireland, a divided community dominated by the Protestant majority. Now, as Irish president, McAleese visits Northern Ireland regularly and has developed good relations on both sides there.

Every year since she took office in 1997, McAleese has held a ceremony July 12 at the president's mansion in Dublin to mark the Northern Irish Protestant celebration of the victory of King William over a Catholic army in 1690.

She told The Times editorial board that peace would come to Northern Ireland as soon as the Irish Republican Army disbanded and changed into something resembling an old soldiers club. She hopes that will come soon.

"The IRA , they are now really, really in the way," she said.

McAleese said some modern social problems have arrived in Ireland along with the success. She mentioned incidents of racism against Eastern European and African immigrants. But on the whole, she said, Irish people have coped well with the new multicultural Ireland.

She recalled generations of Irish emigrants faced initial racism in England and the United States.

"Above all nations on earth," she said, "we have a duty to ensure that we do not treat people that way."

Coping with an influx of strangers is one problem few thought Ireland would ever have.

McAleese now heads to Vancouver, B.C., for a two-day stop before returning to Ireland.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com