Willie Walsh: Stop crying and ‘get on with it’

STOP crying and get on with it — was the message to Irish people from British Airways chief executive, Willie Walsh, who said Ireland is not encouraging people to start businesses.

He said entrepreneurship is a potential for our salvation adding that it’s a “terrible shame” that a lot of entrepreneurs succeed when they leave Ireland.

“We’ve got great people with great ideas that just have to have a bit of confidence, be brave but they need some support,” he said.

He added that not everybody needs to go to university but there should be a renewed focus on apprenticeships and skills.

“There should be an entrepreneurial culture because that’s how we’re going to get out of this. We’re not going to turn ourselves into a manufacturing economy so the best way forward is to unleash the talent that exists there, encourage people.”

He said there’s far too much bureaucracy and regulation adding that the country has to make it easy for people to try in business.

“It shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing for people to try and fail. We discourage people taking risks,” he said.

He said Ireland must stop looking for someone to blame and “get on with it”.

“Let’s take the medicine because there’s no reason why we can’t drag ourselves out of this,” he said.

The former Aer Lingus chief executive said he would be in favour of the Government and Ryanair selling their stakes in Aer Lingus.

“I’ve long held the view that the Government should not have retained its 25% stake in Aer Lingus,” he said.

He said he can’t see anybody being encouraged to invest in the airline while Ryanair and the Government retain their stakes.

“In the last three months I’ve been to India, China, Russia, the States, all around Europe, the Caribbean and everyone knows what’s happening in Ireland. Everybody recognises what went wrong and actually acknowledged that the right steps were being taken.

“The thing that I found is there’s no sympathy. I think a simple message to people is that if they are expecting people to help us out of this they can forget about it. The only way we are going to get ourselves out of these difficulties is if we take action ourselves,” he said.

Mr Walsh said that part of the problem is that Ireland has become lazy and inefficient.

He said he is not a big fan of Bertie Ahern because he thinks he was too used to appeasing the trade unions and that made the country a higher cost economy than it should have been.

He said Ireland has been too expensive for tourists and it didn’t offer what they wanted.

“Ireland became very expensive and that was the feedback I would get...the quality of the product in Ireland relative to the quality of the product you could get elsewhere was relatively poor,” he said.

He said Ireland may have become cheaper but he has yet to see evidence of people getting quality in Ireland.

Mr Walsh was guest speaker at the Cork Chamber annual dinner, which was held at City Hall last night.

British Airways is also looking at expanding at Shannon Airport, he said. In the next 12 to 18 months they may look at starting flights to Boston from Shannon and later to Washington.

Mr Walsh is a Trinity graduate, who started training as a pilot at 17 with Aer Lingus. He was appointed chief executive of British Airways in October 2005.

Picture: International Airlines Group chief executive Willie Walsh and guest speaker at the Cork Chamber annual dinner at City Hall, in Cork, chatting with the Lord Mayor of Cork, Cllr Michael O’Connell and Ger O’Mahoney, president of Cork Chamber. Picture: Denis Minihane