Irish Examiner view: Ireland constrained by the missing links
Britain, May Stephen It Picture: Also Route But Holyhead Ireland’s Gateway To Collins Europe Be Into Is Ireland’s
The continuing disruption at Holyhead on Anglesey caused by Storm Darragh — the port is not scheduled to reopen until January 15 at the earliest — is an unwelcome reminder that our routes and links to the rest of the world are dangerously limited.
Economic stability and, with it, safety depend on effective and reliable supply chains and the ability of citizens to move between destinations.
On this occasion, a major storm destroyed that capability, significantly impacting people and freight and demonstrating the lack of resilient alternatives.
This experience speaks to a wider problem for an island nation with a fast-growing population that has a pressing need to upgrade and update its infrastructure.
At the same time, we are overdependent on a neighbour that may not be in a failing state but is, beyond all argument, ailing.
Holyhead may be Ireland’s route into Britain, but it is also Ireland’s gateway to Europe.
Its destiny is inextricably linked with Dublin Port. Some 4.8m tonnes of freight moved between Dublin and Holyhead last year.
60% of goods arriving in Ireland come through Wales.
Ireland should have a say, or even a financial stake, in the upgrading of Holyhead so that it can properly resist the storms of the future and because it is sufficiently fundamental to our well-being that it cannot be left to the good offices of politicians and civil servants in Cardiff and Westminster.
The fact that no talks are taking place “until the New Year” indicates that we have a different definition of national interest to Britain.
The bottleneck in North Wales meant that even more pressure was thrown onto Ireland’s airports during the festive season.
Some 1m people arrived in Ireland from overseas in the week before Christmas.
Such was the late demand for flights that some one-way departures from Britain soared to more than €500.
At such times the passenger cap on Dublin Airport, established in 2007, and the under-utilisation of Cork looks questionable, to put it at its mildest.
In early winter, and before the holiday break, there was political talk about the establishment of a “department for infrastructure” to oversee all the important projects that Ireland needs and try to keep them on target, a notable weakness in our ambitions of recent years.
Ensuring that our transport links and connections are fit for purpose and analysing potential alternatives is an important objective for a country where exports are expected to grow by 10% with manufacturing contributing to half that total.
Over-reliance on power from one source has already been recognised with the €1.6bn Celtic Interconnector project which will bring electricity from France into Ireland.
We need much more thinking of this kind if Ireland is to realise the potential that we can now see ahead of us.
The gloomiest predictions for Holyhead take re-opening day into March.
Let us hope this is unduly pessimistic. But getting the port running again should only be the start of a new tomorrow.
At Christmas time, TV programme runners like to provide the bones of a shared experience, plus some heightened emotion laced with cross-generational appeal.
And the chance to bid farewell to some long-term visitors.
The BBC’s viewers came close to saying goodbye permanently to after Brendan O’Carroll made a joke during rehearsals in October in which a “racial term was implied” which fell foul of Britain’s pervasive cancel culture.
Profuse apologies finally ensured the show was broadcast.
Meanwhile, seven-times married Gail Chadwick (Potter, Tilsley, Platt, Hillman, McIntyre, and Rodwell as was), played by Helen Worth, quit Coronation Street after 50 years of soap opera, leaving memories of a grotesque mother, psychopath brother, disappointing children, and an admiring serial killer.
In her final episode, her son pointed out Gail’s problem was that she was a doormat.
Which is not something you could ever accuse Beyoncé of being, least of all in her Netflix Super Bowl extravaganza which she concluded by leading 72,000 people in a singalong of ‘Texas Hold ’Em’, from her most recent LP.
We also had the chance to find out what happened to Smithy (James Corden) and Nessa (Ruth Jones) in the final, all-tears edition of .
And if that was too much, , the first blockbuster after covid, was back to bring a change of mood.
Nicola Coughlan was chosen to link with as the eponymous 'Joy to the World' while Anne-Marie Duff stood back from Ireland’s to retrace the steps of Ebenezer Scrooge in her reading of .
And if Tiny Tim and Fezziwig aren’t to your taste, there was always Knocknaheeny’s Kabin Krew to deliver their own RTÉ special.
The Cork rappers, average age of 12, with 2bn plays across social media, are the shape of Christmas yet to come.
Dying shortly before Christmas, when the public’s attention is often elsewhere, can be a recipe for a life’s achievements going unnoticed, at least in the moment.
Many people know something about CS Lewis, the Belfast-born author of the Christian allegory .
They are also aware of Aldous Huxley, the man who started the trend for dystopian novels with .
Many people know also, because it is a favourite quiz question, that their valedictions never received the initial acclaim they deserved because they coincided with the assassination of US president John F Kennedy.
Thus it is that the passing of the Irish-born management guru Charles Handy needs recognition, even though his theories, much lauded in the 90s and remaining influential until this day, have been tarnished by rapacious global capitalism in the 21st century.
Handy, 92, was born in Clane, Co Kildare, the eldest of three children in the family of a Protestant clergyman.
He was raised in the vicarage which had no electricity supply for the first 13 years of his life.
After a secondary education in England, he gained a first in Greats (ancient Greek and Latin, philosophy and classical history) at Oxford before joining Shell as a graduate trainee.
It was based in his experience there that he started to develop his theories about executive failings and the deadening hand of management.
Handy was the author of more than 20 books, starting with the seminal which proclaimed that the ‘Four Cs’ — communication, collaboration, creativity, and competence — were prerequisites for sustainable growth in any company.
Most of his works are essential components of any business studies reading list.
In 1989’s he articulated the concept of a ‘shamrock organisation’ where a core of management and technically skilled full-timers dovetail with freelance and temporary workers whose numbers rise and fall with demand.
It was such a structure that, perhaps, contributed in part to the travails of RTÉ of the past 24 months with the operational flexibilities required finding it difficult to co-exist within an organisation which is publicly subsidised while simultaneously operating in a highly competitive market.
In , Handy foresaw, many years before others came to this conclusion, that the eras of the company man (or woman) were coming to an end.
In the future, executives would require a ‘portfolio career’, carrying out different functions and meeting different ambitions at varying stages of their lives rather than continuously attempting to ascend the corporate pyramid.
This approach also challenged one of those slogans familiar to many — that everyone ultimately ends up in a job to which they are unsuited, reaching “their own level of incompetence”.
Charles Handy received the Irish Presidential Distinguished Service Award for Irish Overseas and an honorary doctor of laws degree from Trinity College, Dublin.
He was an influential contributor to the founding of the London Business School.
His parents wanted him to be a bishop but he instead became a world leader in a new ‘religion’, the theory of management, undertaking a personal crusade which still resonates to prevent workplaces becoming “dysfunctional and unhappy”.