Professor Stephen Kinsella:

I simply wish to comment on where State development has gone really well. I do not work for the guy, but I want to plug Joe Studwell's book, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region. The thing that seems to have worked very well there is a key strategic focus by the State in saying, for example, that it will develop the capability to develop produce extremely high-quality steel for export. There was a State body mandated to help that work and oodles of cash were allocated to do that. It was actually the private sector firms that were put in place and allowed to grow a little bit, but also forced to compete internationally, that really got the thing working. It was that balance of State control in a certain sense, but also allowing these companies to fail where they obviously did not meet the test of export markets. There are loads of examples of other countries, for example, the Philippines, where they tried this and did not allow failing companies to fail.

What happened was simply the creation of domestic oligarchs. We want to avoid that, especially for something as large as the wind industry. It is so big and there is so much money involved that if we design the system incorrectly, it will create huge pots of money that will generate disproportionate amounts of economic power, and the Deputies will be lobbied by those concerned in the future. What we create could be privatised later if that is the prevailing mood, but the key is the generation of domestic capacity. This does not threaten the multinationals in any way. It implies we are going to do this ourselves and put up with the inefficiency and increased cost in the short term to have greater efficiency and societal learning in the long run. Thus, we would become the place where you would go if you had to know about wind power. This is exactly true of Denmark today. It started building up its capacity 40 years ago and is now the place to go if someone wants to build the stuff up. The easiest thing to do, or the thing to do at the lowest level of entry, would be to sort out the offshore planning, buy the turbines from Danish companies and have Danish companies install and run them and pay us a fee. That would be fine but no Irish companies would learn much about how it is done and, therefore, we would always be the client. Ireland is like an intellectual property warehouse. We mined the intangible capital for the rest of the world. It would be much more satisfying and conducive to national economic progress if we were able to generate the intellectual property ourselves, have the ideas ourselves and make it work. The balance of public and private is needed to make that a big success.