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Creating Opportunity Out of Change | SPECIAL FEATURE
(Photo captioned: Shane Naughton, US based Trinity alumnus - Vice President, Thomson Reuters)
US based alumnus Shane Naughton M.Sc., M.A. (1994) looks at his country and his College from US perspective.
Attitudes towards being Irish and what that means have been shifting here in recent months as economic and social circumstances change. As an alumnus working in the United States for Thompson Reuters, Shane Naughton has a distinctly different view of ‘being Irish’.
“I think it takes a while to switch from having an implicit identity, which is what my upbringing would have given me, to an explicit identity, effectively wearing it on your sleeve,” he says. Automatically labelled as ‘Irish’ throughout his career in the US, Naughton believes that racial distinctions are applied to people there universally, but in the best possible way.
“I think people forget that the US is a very young country, so from that perspective, the mentality is one of a country of immigrants. It’s quite common that someone will say they are seven-eighths Irish and one-eighth Danish, for example. They’ll know the history of their great grandparents.” As an Irish person, he argues, we simply don’t make that part of our identity.
"The University has an opportunity to be a leader in engaging with the greater Irish community worldwide…to tap into the greater Irish community that exists out there, either from a funding or networking perspective"
Naughton himself got an early job in the US through an Irish recruiter, who he says, recognised the value of his degree and knew from where he was, and that as a result he didn’t have to “establish my credentials from scratch.”
“For me at least, both on a personal and professional level, there has been nothing but open doors for someone associated with the Irish ‘brand’. While the doors are open, you still have to walk through them. But I think it helps if you are Irish or have Irish connections and are comfortable embracing them.”
As the conversation moves away from Naughton’s US career to more domestic issues, I ask him for his thoughts on Ireland’s immediate future. After a moment’s consideration, he answers as an international businessman might. “The general wellbeing of the country and its citizens, from my perspective, has to come back to its ability to sustain a competitive worldwide economy. If we can not do that, we are going to have issues competing and providing a standard of living to which we’ve become used.”
He believes Ireland has to be the centre of innovation which he thinks it has been for the past two decades. Research and development is, to Naughton, crucial to the next decade, and it is also primarily university-based. Although universities have a primary function to educate, he argues that they have a strategic responsibility to become an ‘R&D engine’, fostering ideas which could grow into businesses later on.
As an example, he cites Havok, a spin-off from the Computer Science Department in Trinity. Havok currently works with the big names in game development, such as EA, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. Naughton wants to see more of this kind of development in the future.
“The challenges are going to be on the funding side,” he admits, “But I think the extent to which they can collaborate with external sources to do research is an area which can be expanded.”
Has he any fi nal thoughts as an alumnus living abroad? He answers that he believes it is critical to engage with other alumni like him, and to draw strength from the community.
“The University has an opportunity to be a leader in engaging with the greater Irish community worldwide,” he says. “For me, it’s about continuing to innovate and continuing to leverage our resource sets in any way we can…to tap into the greater Irish community that exists out there, either from a funding or networking perspective.”
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