Going public has not delivered for Irish firms
This will be a pretty performance from the group founded in a Portakabin in 1972 in Tralee.
It is a product of vision, commitment, hard work, and a fair amount of necessity.
Looking back it was one of the most unlikely success stories to emerge from the new Ireland that was starting to believe in its own ability and which also saw the potential the Irish diary sector had to offer.
The rest is history so to speak. The point about Kerry’s success is that it emerged from rural Ireland, from the sector that was part of our heritage and involved a long tradition, even if it still suffered from a serious lack of development and vision at that time.
With the economy on its knees it is perhaps time to ask where this economy needs to focus in the future.
Sadly too many of the companies to emerge out of our core natural area of food and drink have fallen foul of the much praised market system and at this point are just Irish in name.
Back in the mid-1960s Irish Distillers was formed to exploit the US whiskey market, a good idea but it failed because the group did not have the commercial clout to make it in the tightly controlled US market dominated by Scotch and US spirit offerings.
The reality is there was nothing wrong with our product and under Pernod Ricard, the French drinks giant, the Irish group has flourished.
It can be argued retrospectively that with state aid the group could have done better.
And when the strong links between Ireland and the US are taken into account it is not unreasonable to suggest that concerted state aid and lobbying of the US authorities could have established Irish whiskey in the US and the group could be an Irish flagship instead of a subsidiary of a French group.
But we no longer own those great brands and at this point Pernod has established Jameson as the fastest growing whiskey brand in the world.
For years we accepted that Irish whiskey would not sell internationally and in the space of a few years the Pernod group has shown that to be a lie.
We probably lost the whiskey business because the group was taken public.
Free markets became all the rage and going public was seen by many of us as the new way forward.
Going public has not delivered the results for Irish firms that we might have hoped for and indeed the same can be said for other countries as well.
In truth we have totally immersed ourselves in the free market ethos where profit, shareholder reward and the survival of the fittest are the mantras that drive the system.
That’s fair enough in as far as it goes but often the stock market does not serve the long-term interest of the business, the community or the employees.
Greencore is a very good example of how going public can derail a very fine group that was previously state owned as the Irish Sugar Company.
One thing is certain: this economy and the Irish people need to examine where they want this economy to go.
As things stand our slavish dependence on US multinationals has left us in a pretty perilous state.
We have given our power over to these companies in the hope that they will bring us economic deliverance.
It’s not that simple. These firms come and go.
We have lost thousands of jobs in Dell and serious question marks now hang over Intel at this stage.
If this country does not want to be forced back to hill farming then we need to do a serious rethink about what we want from this country and for ourselves.
