On St Patrick’s Day two years ago, while nudging my way up a crammed Fifth Avenue, the idea of the Farmleigh Global Irish Forum came to me. I’d thought about it before and I had seen how other countries cultivated relationships with their global tribes — particularly the Jewish tribe and Israel — but it was only after seeing the unique outpouring of Irish America on March 17 that I knew we should do this. We should tap into the power of the tribe and see where it takes us.
Like many initiatives, the real power of something like Farmleigh can never be dictated in advance. There is an element of chaos in putting people together who don’t know each other and are bonded by something as fluid as having an “interest” in Ireland and allowing the conversations and ideas to flow.
But Ireland has never been short of ideas, if anything we have loads of ideas and not enough people who can execute them. The hardest part about ideas is getting them to fulfil their potential. This is what any entrepreneur will tell you. It is also what any artist or writer will tell you. It’s easy to have an idea for a book, the hard part is having the discipline to write it.
Similarly, had the officials and Foreign Affairs Minister Micheal Martin not been open to the idea, Farmleigh would have remained an idea thrown out in a bar on St Patrick’s Day — how many of these do we have? So it’s all about execution and no matter how amenable the diaspora or tribe is, we still have to translate an emotion into a reality.
Out of Farmleigh have come a number of concrete initiatives and only time will tell how many others are bubbling away under the surface. Dermot Desmond’s University of the Arts, the Farmleigh Graduate Programme, the latest tourism campaign ‘Home’, the ‘Gateway Ireland’ portal as well as the many regional Farmleighs which are taking place today — all these are tangible. Sure, Farmleigh had its critics, and some of the points made are valid and apposite — but you have to try, you have start somewhere and the connections made are likely to throw up more initiatives.
This is the beauty of setting up networks and bringing people together, you simply have to stand back and let human curiosity, ingenuity and love of risk run its course.
These are the sort of characteristics which join two of the most interesting types of people in our world — the artists and the entrepreneurs. One of the most gratifying and unexpected developments to come out of Farmleigh has been the realisation that artists and entrepreneurs are on the same side.
For many years this natural alliance has been obscured, often by arts administrators who, as bureaucrats, are more risk averse than either artists or entrepreneurs. Some academics play this role too, a sort of false bohemia cosseted by the protection of a State salary.
These folk like to hang with artists but would never risk their own creature comforts and live like artists. It is natural — no in fact it is essential — therefore, to create an enemy that is inimical to the artistic temperament so that the artists never see who their real kindred spirits are and the entrepreneur never sees that the artist gets up every day.
The fat-cat businessman image is a type of Dickensian caricature, counting his swag and scoffing at artistic effort. But this is far from the truth.
Take James Joyce for example. Joyce was an entrepreneur before he was an artist.
In September 1909, on a visit to Trieste, Eva Joyce, James’s younger sister, suggested to Jim that there was money in cinemas. For a city of 400,000, Trieste had loads of cinemas. In contrast, there wasn’t even one in Ireland.
Joyce was sold and he put together four venture capitalists to back him. Joyce negotiated 10pc for himself. Today, this capital would have been known in the jargon as “sweat equity”.
Joyce set off in October 1909. By December the Volta cinema was open on Mary Street in Dublin, with Joyce as proprietor. The ‘Evening Telegraph’ covered the Volta’s opening night on December 20: “James Joyce, who is in charge, has worked apparently indefatigably and deserves to be congratulated on the success of the inaugural exhibition.”
Two other ventures captivated Joyce. The first was a plan to import skyrockets into Trieste, and the second was to import Irish tweeds into Italy. Both projects were dropped and the Volta folded, but all three episodes reveal a portrait of the artist as a young entrepreneur.
Joyce, arguably our finest and definitely our most celebrated writer, saw no contradiction between artist and the entrepreneur. Rather they are complementary and at their root the artist and the entrepreneur are similar. A fine business brain is as interested, irreverent, creative and alert as a fine artistic mind. The artist sees himself as outside the mainstream. So too does the entrepreneur. Both celebrate the individual over the collective. Both regard security with a certain distance.
There is a striking similarity about their worldview. Both regard most of society’s obsession with certainty and security as bizarre. Neither can bear the idea of working for someone else for a wage.
The very thought of taking orders from a bureaucrat strikes fear in both. Working is about creating, beating the competition and expressing themselves, not about pointless committees, political games and promotion.
In the end, artists and entrepreneurs are the only people in society who do not retire. They rarely become jaded or washed up. Of course, many artists and entrepreneurs become part of the establishment, feted by politicians, the media and corporates alike, but most remain beyond the pale.
What binds these two apparently contradictory groups? Risk. Risk and a love of risk, originality and freedom, distinguish the entrepreneur and the artist from others.
Both groups live on their wits, not from the type of corporate arse-kissing that dominates many “successful” career structures in corporate and public sector Ireland. They make things happen by displaying enormous self-belief, hard work and attitude.
An interesting way of looking at the similarities is to remember your schooldays and examine the subsequent careers of friends. In many cases those who ploughed their own furrow either artistically or in business were remarkably similar.
It wasn’t really that surprising, therefore, that when I got up to chair the final session at Farmleigh, there was a little knot of some of Ireland’s and the diaspora’s finest entrepreneurs and artists huddled together excitedly.
These people understood each other. They are spiritual bedfellows and unlike others they — artists, writers and entrepreneurs — realise that the idea isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. The hard part is the hours spent on your own — writing, tearing up, getting up when you’ve been knocked down and taking the flack from the critics, who tell you that idea will never fly. This St Patrick Day, let’s celebrate these doers.
David.
What is the point contributing innovative ideas into the market place when the whole edifice is rigged.
Wills the point is, you have the power to get out of the rat race and entrepreneurs know how to print their own money and pay less tax to the crooks
Wills, the point is that without ideas, and many of them, nothing happens and the edifice, as you put it, remains rigged.
David, throughout history, the great strength of the Irish people appears to be “creativity”.
So, I think you are right: Look at the per capita Nobel Prizes for literature, alone?
Massive, per capita.
I posted a link on the last article, of the Governor of California, promising to bring business to Ireland, because he has seen the innovation and creativity of the Irish entrepreneurs who have set-up businesses in Silicon Valley.
All good news.
You are right.
But, our leaders must start to focus on this, instead of cutbacks and trying to fool the EU.
Folks, Michael Moore, on the scam in the US:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/35917587#35917587
Friedman, Iceland, 1984:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EBBF6DB20C85145A
(via Liam Delaney, UCD).
Hear hear David, I have a number of artist friends and family, and, in addition to buying them copies of The Artist’s Way, I have also implored them to read and understand the metaphysical message behind Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (original editions only folks, you have been warned). You are bang on. Its EXACTLY the same stuff. Ideas, how to grow them, how to guard them and see them into reality. How to build your desire and belief. How to war against fear. How to trust your intuition. Literally, THINK and grow RICH. Rich min mind, rich… Read more »
David is forever ducking and diving what needs to happen in this country is to cut our public spending so that our borrowing is less than 3% of GDP. Only then will we get the economy back on track, actually we need to have surpluses so that we repay our national debt. In my house the only debt is a small mortgage and I keep spending under what I earn. It is simple housekeeping. We need to cut another 3 billion in 2011 and 3 billion every year until 2014. The ECB is in charge of our economy thankfully ,… Read more »
David, Thanks for this article and for your initiative to realize the Farmleigh projects. That itself is a piece of art. Great success!! I posted before questioning why the Irish artists receive so little funding and stimulation from the GOV. Somehow the boom period made the Irish loose any sense of appreciating small achievements. Ireland has a proven record of creative ideas and thinking and this is gradually diminishing. I came from a society that one had one job and that was sufficient to survive. No need to earn an extra bob here and there. It was all very straightforward.… Read more »
Saw it today on the streets, it is about much more than the diaspora. I saw people from Indonesia, Tongo, Poland, Hungary and many more walking and performing in the parade. The thought struck me, its not just about a diaspora, it is about the all embracing nature of the Irish, the wonderment of our culture, that is our true talent, an honest broker in a world badly in need of someone to trust. The Irish can offer the true open hand. The celebration of cultures today under the banner of St. Patrick was a true revelation! As for art,… Read more »
Folks, White House F*@up, in fairness, but here you go:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/18/obama-thanks-irish-pm-repeats-speech-teleprompter-meltdown/
Meanwhile back in 2010, NAMA gets ready to throw the family jewels down the crapper. Gurdgiev reckons that even apart from the general NAMA madness, it could lose billions just through sloppy definitions in its LTEV calculations.
http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/03/economics-17032010-nama-estimation.html
Hard to believe that it is exactly eighteen short months since the gobshite/gangster (delete as appropriate) Pat Neary was assuring us that the Irish banks were perfectly safe and functional.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuHRulXfzGA&feature=player_embedded
Listen to WILLS :
‘wills says
David.
What is the point contributing innovative ideas into the market place when the whole edifice is rigged.’
Focus on fixing the rigged system first and then afterwards you can ‘feel safe’ to allow your dreams – ideas- intutition – innovation – development – activity commence —– otherwise you are wasting your time and only creating enemies around you and your family.We need proper leaders and laws and enforcements otherwise you are a ‘dead man walking ‘ in Ireland.
Idea Our spiritual needs are important and currently our rc church leader is contemplating resigning even though he does not say so.Without going into why he should and should not when he does there will be a big vacuum and the Roman Curia will be worried because other fringe christian movements will like vultures purchase our churches to enable the RC to defray the pending court awards .Rather than waiting we as a nation should form our own Celtic Church and buy these churches and have our own laws and not the cannon laws of Rome dictating our rights .When… Read more »
I make stuff, and sometimes make stuff happen, so maybe I’m one of those you’re creating myths about. “live like an artist” “remain beyond the pale” what next?…”eats meat with fingers”…”raises feral children in Phoenix Park”…”saves economy with poetic devices”…”wears cape of knitted shamrock to fly faster that Ryan Air”. I understand a little about Soft Power, hearts and minds, questioning attitudes and all that comes with it. I believe society currently explains itself as a market, with power retained by a small number of stall holders. So maybe we should start our thinking process better and broader information ?.… Read more »
Spiritual Ignorance@Our Peril Failure to be seen to repair our spiritual needs will result in many new foreign kinds of roman curia and newer cannon laws .Try to imagine the following places making our national spiritual decision needs : Lagos, Utah, Nevada, Mecca , & Others Or the following new spiritual laws replacing the Roman Cannon Laws : Sharia Laws Cult Laws Manmade Scientific Laws Jungle Laws We need to write our own national spiritual needs with its spiritual center in Ireland .We need to reclaim St. Patrick and rewrite his teachings to be ours . Failure to act will… Read more »
New Light – if you see light at the end of a dark tunnell in Ireland now watch out because it is an uncoming runaway train heading against you .
SEAN FITZPATRICK HAS JUST BEEN ARRESTED
the ball is rolling now, briaN cowen announced in the states a discounted education for the irsh diaspora, so lets fill all the empty houses with students..like i have said before, irish education is respected the world over…thanks to all that went before us , missionaries and brothers and everyone else from victorian times to the brothers that train the ethiopian runners in africa today..point being, education …by the irish ..is welcomed and respected the world over….so use our network of educational facilities to train, educate and welcome people from all over the world. Those that are not diaspora can… Read more »
Hi David, And a belated Happy St Paddy’s Day to you, and to all who frequent this site. > This St Patrick Day, let’s celebrate these doers. I agree that we should celebrate doers. But as you allude to in your article, there are many in our economic ecosystem who are not doers but who are leaches and connivers. Your article title is that Artists and Entrepreneurs can be a key to our recovery. However, I do not think that is the case. Yes, Artsists and Entrepreneurs do share some traits in terms of risk, yet they do so completely… Read more »
I am steadfastly against David’s proposal. In fact it is nonsense. We are at the moment learnining about the serious errors from mixing business with the state. From mixing the state with religion. From mixing the state with art. etc. etc. We seem to have this insipid urge to mix up stuff that should be left alone. Mixing Art with business will make Art corrupt, and business ridiculous. Second, we have been prone to what has been called a “Bull-shit run”. This is a particular theory that is rationally flawed, but which suceeds in infecting the intellectual culture and running… Read more »
St.Patrick’s Day joke.
BIFFO is in Washington, on a personal mission to find long lost relatives….
Harney is in Australia, because she wants to be in a place where she can have a good long dry spell…..
and Calamity Coughlan is in Germany in an effort to meet as many extremely serious intellectuals as possible……so as to engage in heavy intellectual conversation…and teach them all a thing or two : ))))
How much tax do artists pay in comparison to all other workers ? Oh yeah, that’s right. They got an exemption from CJH. Time the arts lobby stopped protesting and started paying taxes like the rest of us. That includes Bertie ‘Autobiogaphy’ Ahern, Bono and chums, the writers of Fair City, and all the other people who declared themselves as “Artists” in Ireland. It is becomming farcical. Maybe I should set up a property rezoning business and try and declare the income as art. Artists should not be allowed to get away with anything that the rest of the workforce… Read more »
As it happens, years before I studied business studies, I studied music and worked for about 4-5 years as a musician and teacher (basically I had to pay the bills). I totally disagree with the comment on Arts Admins. Most of them come from a creative background and are brilliant – only a small minority have come from non artistic backgrounds and generally most are well willing to take risks (after all, we made a much bigger risk on our lives and careers by studying arts subjects in the first place). The problem is that often they’ve little or no… Read more »
With hundreds of SMES closing every month, forget about entrepreneurs driving a recovery.As for artists, it is a tiny specialised area completely dependent on tax shelters.With employmnet falling by 100k per annum, we will be back to 1.2 milion in employment within 5 years, the level it was in 1922.
Well well David,
the BBC are full of high praise for you! As they should be. And a vocie cried out in the wilderness……..but nobody was listening…….
“The Irish economist David McWilliams described the bank in 2006 as being “simply a leveraged hedge fund betting its own and its clients’ money on overvalued property”.
With some prescience, he added: “Normally when the property market collapses, these type of outfits go bust.””
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8574396.stm
DMcW v Max Keiser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0nyR8pZaEg&feature=player_embedded
In his last article David mentioned the Beatles’ ‘I’m only sleeping”. Until I bought the album three years ago I had never heard it although it’s one of their finest. Same applies to the Neil Young track a while back (which by an odd coincidence I had onlyh been listening to the night before I read the article). If you go abroad it is not uncommon to hear three classic songs in a row on the radio. This happened to me in Friesland, in Majorca (an English-language station as it happens). When I visited Portugal in 2007 there was a… Read more »
“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. ” Andy Warhol
A new campaign. One observer believes the people behind the campaign may not be as upfront as they could be as to who they are?
http://www.valueireland.com/2010/03/thinkirish-ie-a-new-buy-irish-campaign/
Its an online directory. Looks like a good effort to me by an unincorporated association. Nothing murky here. Just good effort I think.
This is sickening.
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/garda-held-over-sargent-letter-leak-2103704.html
The gardai could hardly be said to have done anything wrong, even by the annals of the need to protect Irish authority. I get the sense that this garda will be made an example of, at the behest of the government for the purpose of upholding authority.
Is the Seanie Fitz thing a distraction ?
Unfortunately, there are a number of short-sghted and reactionary comments here to the mixing of the words artist and entrepreneur. Both are of the same stuff in the main. Yes, there are pragmatic entrepreneurs; loads of them! But true visionaries share many similarities with artists: – how they come in possession of their ideas, how they surround themselves with appropriate physical and social stimuli, how they bring latent action to fruition. John Maynard Keynes. Artist, philosopher, economist. http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/167934457.html Tellingly, one of the greatest influences on our modern world, from an economic standpoint, can arguably be said to one of the… Read more »
Heading over to Bray police station for 6.30 to throw some eggs at Doctor Frankenstein.
Seanie is doing an overnighter.
Today’s arrest of Sean Fitzpatrick is a total PR stunt. He was arrested at 6.30am— for the morning news, & the drama of the 6.30pm deadline is for Prime Time evening news. We will all wake to more of it tomorrow morning with another 6.30am deadline. But what’s worse it is diversionry tactic. It’s obviously an attempt to soften public opinion towards Anglo before they report the biggest losses in Irish corporate history. This is not a welcome development in the entire Anglo affair ~ it is sadly an indication of the government’s intention to pump more millions / billions… Read more »
You forgot technologists David. They, far more than artists, will sustain an economy. We need to demote economists, speculators, bankers, publicans, car dealers, farmers, estate agents etc .. and invest in technologists. Will we do it? I doubt it. You are right about the Irish brand. It has a lot of potential, especially with our American cousins who really love it when they come here. We should start by cleaning up this country top to toe. The only Irish writer who I could relate to during the past 10 years was Paul Howard (Ross O’Carroll Kelly). He was fresh and… Read more »
“Could the U.S. become another Ireland?”
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/03/18/could-the-us-become-another-ireland/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BaselineScenario+%28The+Baseline+Scenario%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#
I don’t see art ever making its way except by patronage. Go to our National Concert Hall any night — you’ll get amazing value compared to any of the usual extortionate pop concerts, but even at the low prices they have difficulty getting bums on seats for some events. I can’t see it paying its own way without corporate sponsorship and subsidies via RTE. Commercial ventures like Riverdance, on the other hand, can make lots of money but only at the expense of “art”. Riverdance might have been a nice idea for a Eurovision interval, but the commercialised version was… Read more »
Paddyjones.
NAMA is a banking heist stealing the taxpayers of Ireland of the sum totaling at 55 billion euros.
Now here’s an idea — make all government data public, from Dáil deputies’ receipts (yeah, I know they cancelled them) to departmental expenditures of every variety. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8572809.stm If someone lobbied successfully to get the data, I’d work for free on software to publish/analyze it. We could even invent some open government data standards (as is done for data in many other walks of life) to foster open sourcing of new analysis software that would work across many countries and give us a comparative analysis. I think it would be a major innovation in democracy. Maybe we could persuade FG to… Read more »
The search continues to find suckers to prop up the Irish property market….this time students who get to find out that Irish university grading systems are supportive. And they might even develop life long addictions to be delusional, to drinking stout (being politically correct so as to not offend people from Cork), and maybe even learn how to play golf on all those golf course that are not as filled as they used to be.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/st-patricks-day/global-irish-lured-home-2102909.html
Should we tell them that the country is run by the maFFia ??
This country’s serial tendency to go from crisis to delusions of granduer back to crisis will only end….. when there is an serious and unpreventable outbreak of common sense. I don’t think I need to say anymore. And that is not going to be allowed to happen. In fact every other option will be tried first. For the sake of pride and the obsession with self importance. So, everyone, look should just batten down the hatches, let the madness pass, and make sure that you will be able to look after themselves and their own relatives when all the delusions… Read more »
A cruelty is not been stuck on the fence but rather to actually see yourself sitting there. If you really need to be loved get off the fence and do something to be loved for…
Fintan O’ Toole on NPR here stateside yesterday : http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/03/irelands-epic-boom-and-bust
Folks, Visualisations of ANGLO losses:
http://thestory.ie/2010/03/19/anglo-losses/
Did any of you observe the following headline on the front page of today’s Independent: Top bankers face quiz after FitzPatrick arrest
http://www.independent.ie//independent.ie/editorial/todaysPaper/todayspaper20100319.pdf
The first question in the quiz will be: What is the capital of Ireland?
Answer: Doublin’ (minus €3 bn, minus €6 bn, minus €12 bn, . . . ad infinitum et ad nauseam, etc, etc; sorry, cannot reveal the final amount as it is “sub judice”)
Roped & Necked & CO
Tonsils are swelling along the Liffey today and with daily higher rising tides bookies are betting which bridge will be chosen for The Pantheon .
David I wonder did you ever read McCarthy’s Bar. There’s a wonderful image in it of the tourists having fun in Durty Nelly’s at Bunratty while the locals meet up in the fake bar in the theme park instead. You have yourself noted that the Irish have cast off their language, and the North, and appear to be shedding their religion also and in that sense they are very modern, or postmodern, or whatever. They don’t seem to have a distinctive cuisine of their own (strip a menu of all the flowery waffle and what are you left with?), their… Read more »
For those that wonder where Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan stands on all of this….
http://www.businessinsider.com/greenspans-paper-on-the-crisis-2010-3