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Creating Opportunity Out of Change | SPECIAL FEATURE


(Photo captioned: Peter Sutherland, Board Member Trinity Foundation and International Businessman)

Peter Sutherland LL.D. (h.c.) (1996) speaks to David Molloy about Ireland’s missed opportunity and why we are in danger of losing our best and brightest students.

Peter Sutherland is a man to whom success is no stranger. Quite apart from his current positions as Chair of Goldman Sachs and BP, his CV also includes those of former Attorney General and Chairman of AIB. Having worked both within Ireland, and at a European and global level, he is well placed to comment on where Ireland should go now.

"On the one hand, we are quite insular: insular in the sense of being very interested in what we are ourselves,” he begins. “And yet at the same time, we are intermingled with others because we are so small.”

The integration of Europe and world globalisation has led to Ireland being more integrated than would historically have been the case, he believes. “We have this contradiction between this sense of belonging, which is very profound, and yet an involvement in a more integrated world which is also considerable and accentuated by the fact that Ireland had such a long history of both mobility and emigration, and of connection, therefore, with other parts of the world.”

“This connection is,” he says, “a great strength Ireland possesses. However caused, the ability to communicate with others has always been a characteristic of the Irish people – that and a deep sense of self-worth.”

It is a fact that Irish people do not accept the existence of ‘glass ceilings’

“It is a fact that Irish people do not accept the existence of ‘glass ceilings’. They do not accept or believe in a natural hierarchy. They have not been brought up in a society which has been divided by class – in terms of our post-republican history – and are intensely suspicious of the touching of forelocks.” The conclusion is, of course, the Irish people have an abundance of self-confidence.

However, Peter Sutherland admits that confi dence is something in short supply at the moment. So, in hindsight and as a businessman, how does he refl ect on the boom and its subsequent collapse? “I think that the history of Ireland's economic performance has generally been very poor, and I think we deserve very little credit for such moments of great achievement as have been obtained,” he fi rmly replies.

He believes the conclusion of the internal market in the early ‘90s gave Ireland a ‘heaven-sent’ opportunity for expansion, as a nation with a moderately well educated English-speaking workforce. This allowed us to act as a gateway to the European market. “That has been steadily eroded. It's very diffi cult to look back on that period with anything more than a sense of profound disquiet that we missed the opportunity to sustain something which could have been of great advantage.”

Looking forward, what are the greatest challenges? The cost of our public services, from health to education, simply isn’t matching the return. While we have managed to get a lot of people through the university system, we have not, according to Peter Sutherland, reached a level of excellence in education that we need.

“I think we have to recognise that we are to do the best we can for our young people. It's not merely a matter of proper pupil-to-teacher ratios. It's also a question of the proper monitoring, control, testing, and analysis of teaching.”

Rather than simply pay out to universities on the basis of student numbers, the former Attorney General is keen to see the exaltation of success and the discouragement of failure based on objective results. The current system, he feels, is murky at best.

“We have to have an analysis of how much ‘Ireland Inc.’ is costing, and offer the results of the costs that we're putting into it. At the moment I think that the information is often deliberately obscured. The University sector has to brutally express its need for recognition for excellence and accept the negative of failure. We are in danger of losing our top students unless we push up the standards. They will move for scholarships and they won't come back. After all, who wants to come out of a university with a ranking in terms of university which doesn't match up? Graduates are signifi cantly better paid on getting through university so which would they prefer? To have the reputation of a first class university or a second-class university?”


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