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Martin, tell us a little about your background. I’m from Kerry, and that’s something I’m extremely proud of! I attended college in the capital, at the Dublin Institute of Technology, studying hotel and catering management before going on to manage hotels, which was an industry I loved. I picked up a couple of Masters degrees along the way. From there it was on to the then state tourism training agency, CERT, and later to the government policy advisory board, Forfás, where I held a variety of roles before becoming CEO in 2010. There, I worked closely with the Government on the Action Plan for jobs. We set a target of 100,000 new jobs by 2015, which at the time seemed extraordinarily ambitious, given that unemployment was at over 15 per cent and heading in the wrong direction. We now know that the target was exceeded.
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How has the daily reality of this role lived up to your expectations? I was aware this would be a 24/7 role, and the reality has certainly matched my expectation. There’s no such thing as an average day in IDA, not alone as CEO of IDA. We are very much at our clients’ beck and call; doing whatever is necessary in order to win investment, which includes being anywhere in the world at any point in time that we need to be. I tend to break my work into three areas. First is interaction with clients and prospective clients; that happens both here in Ireland and internationally. I tend to be out of the country one week in every three. Second is engaging with government, the rest of the policy system, and the rest of Team Ireland, which includes the utility providers, the government Departments, business representative groups, and so on. The remainder of my time is spent supporting my extremely hard-working team of over 300 who are dispersed across the globe. And so the look of my day is dependent on which part of the world I am in. In Ireland I’ll spend a lot of time outside the capital, in regional locations, while out in market a large amount of my time would also be spent engaging with international media, marketing Ireland as it were.
How does the media aspect sit with you – are you a natural performer? It’s not something that comes naturally to me, but I do an awful lot of it, so I suppose it’s like anything one does repeatedly – it becomes a little easier. But I am never complacent! I know it is a direct way of getting the Ireland message and the Ireland story out to a large audience.
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