Small firms need a boost but it is selective to ignore progress to date

Public memory is subservient to current problems and what yesterday attracted all of our attention shrinks, writes Terry Prone

The Small Firms Association had a conference last week on the theme of boosting small business. Boosting the profits, the confidence and the communications of owners and managers of small companies.

Their keynote speaker, mid-morning, was Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin. This was a surprise. Brendan Howlin does the Dáil and media interviews and soundbites, but he doesn’t seem to leap on opportunities to speak at public events such as the SFA gig. He’s the exception in that regard.

He arrived early enough to listen attentively enough to AJ Noonan’s civilly combative speech, in which the SFA chairman pointed out that the prices his members could charge for their goods and services were below what they were eight years ago, and that any government moves related to wages and salaries needed to take that into consideration.

When he took to the stage, Mr Howlin started by addressing several of the points Mr Noonan had raised — with matching combative civility. He had brought a speech with him, and he probably covered the essence of its content, although where ad lib ended and written text began was mercifully unclear. The writer of said speech deserves a big brownie point for it being mercifully free of that ministerial cliche, “I am satisfied that...” Amazing, that scripts continue to use a phrase which invites even positive thinkers in the audience to go “Who gives a toss that you’re satisfied with anything? Remind us, now, who pays your salary? Whose satisfaction level matters, here? Ours, Sunshine, not yours, right?”

What was most fun, though, was the question-and-answer session that followed. It was managed with unobtrusive but steely efficacy by Claire Byrne. One of the audience members who took the roving microphone introduced his question by suggesting that while the minister would probably claim to have improved the economy... he got no further. I didn’t get the precise wording of what he said, but the minister sure as hell did, and he wasn’t having any.

Mr Howlin cut across the microphone-wielder, mid-sentence, and told him that there was no “probable” about it, nor was it an improvement. The Government had done a resolute rescue job on an unprecedented disaster, he told him, had negotiated a deal that allowed gardaí, nurses, and other public servants to get paid, in September of the year of the disaster, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise, had prevented us sliding into something akin to the Great Depression and members of the Cabinet, attending meetings in Europe, were constantly praised for a unique achievement.

Having said all that and having effectively removed the premise on which the audience member was basing his question, Mr Howlin courteously asked the questioner, to get on with putting whatever query he wanted to raise.

As a reply, it lacked the eagerness to be liked which prompts younger politicians to experience every negative opinion poll as a personal assault.

The evidence about the economy stacks up in Brendan Howlin's and the Government's favour, despite people's gut instincts.

But, most of all, Mr Howlin’s response was a refusal to accept selective public memory as applied to the economy. He was in the same space as that usually occupied by Gay Byrne when he half-ironically rolls his eyes and says “how quickly they forget”. Public memory is always subservient to current problems and the challenges which just yesterday attracted all of our national attention shrink, Lilliput-fashion, when new challenges, such, for example, as the possible return of BSE, present their terrifying selves.

Three years ago, we had queues around the block for temporary jobs, we had everybody in negative equity, half the rest in Nama, and sick people not going to the doctor because they wouldn’t be able to pay for the prescription they might get. Mr Howlin gave day, date, and detail about exactly how different things are now, and just how instrumental was the Government in getting us there. You got the feeling that if anybody used the line “but we’re not really feeling it”, he might have left them without the capacity to feel very much. It wasn’t that he was rude or cross. He simply wasn’t buying any proposition that minimised what had been achieved or who had achieved it and he had the look of a man who’d had it up to here with people proposing that proposition. The audience absorbed what he said while quietly juxtaposing it with their own lived experience, and courteously kept their own counsel about discrepancies between the two. Most of them. Not including the questioners taking hold of the roving mike.

A media friend and I were down at the back of the hall, where I was sitting before making a contribution to the morning, and my friend was muttering. His first satirical mutter was that Howlin mustn’t move in the right circles. After all, he said, Taoiseach Enda Kenny is forever telling stories in public about encounters he has with randomers each of whom, in marginally different words, tell him the Government is playing a blinder. My reporter pal said the Taoiseach is making the randomers up in order to pat himself and his cabinet colleagues on the back. Perfectly obvious, he went on, that Mr Howlin doesn’t get randomers. Or, if he does, they’re negative.

I pointed out that he was missing the fact that Mr Howlin had quoted several globally important randomers as telling him the same thing plumbers and shopkeepers tell the Taoiseach. He shrugged, thereby dismissing plumbers, shopkeepers and EU/IMF VIPs in one gesture: None of them were valid, set against home-grown negative opinion.

It’s a fascinating extension of a communications principle marketers come to terms with early in their studies. People do not make major purchases, such as homes or cars, based on facts. They make them based on gut instinct and retrospectively justify them with facts carefully selected from the available data.

If you’re running a small business and you have yet to see the economic recovery appearing in your company accounts, then it doesn’t matter how eminent are the voices of authority praising Ireland’s performance to the minister, it doesn’t matter what statistics are produced to prove the point, and it doesn’t matter that lads in the street are pitching up in front of the Taoiseach to praise him. Not only does it not change your mind about your own situation, it makes you doubt and dismiss the claims themselves.

We know Mr Howlin’s laudatores are real, whether we like them or not, because they’re on the public record. Mr Kenny’s, according to current consensus, are self-evidently fictional. But then, current consensus doesn’t see the Taoiseach walking to work each morning. During the course of that walk, he encounters other pedestrians, many of whom accost him to shake hands — he’s famous, after all — and some of whom inevitably tell him he’s playing a blinder. Because, except when we’re properly making demands at conferences, we’re a really pleasant lot. Face to face, at least...