In a further blow to the ailing economy, Google has decided to abandon plans to locate up to 100 software engineering jobs in Ireland because it was unable to find enough qualified candidates here.

A little over-dramatized in the Evening Herald but a very serious issue. We are not turning out enough engineers and we are not attracting enough engineers from abroad.

New suburbanism is a new way of solving the environmental crisis, an alternative to ‘new urbanism’ (which basically means creating more dense urban areas). The problem with the concept is that the underlying principles (which are really assumptions) are mainly wrong. You cannot support a global population of ten billion people on this planet if they are all spread all over the place, have an attachment to their living places, are not subsistence farmers and have to travel to congregate at work or school on a regular basis.

However, there is one thing we can learn from new suburbanism.  According to the author,

Personal transportation devices are tantalizingly close to becoming ultra safe conveyances that can drive on full autopilot and have zero environmental footprint, and we are within a few decades at most of having abundant clean energy. The age of the personal driving machine has just begun.

It is true to say that driving technology has only begun. But it is just not true that autopilot cars are ‘tantalizingly close’ or even close at all. There is simply not a lot of practical research going on in the area of self-driving cars. But the new suburbanists are right, there should be. Road transport is here to stay and we need to work hard on making it comfortable and efficient.

A company that is doing something practical to provide cars with a smaller environmental footprint is Better Place. These guys are gearing up to roll out the infrastructure to make electric cars a reality. We should be doing this in Ireland. There are only a thousand or so petrol stations in Ireland and it would be relatively cheap to make our road network run on electricity.

It is interesting to see the perception people have of Ireland’s biggest airline. There is an assumption that because Ryanair does one particular thing well, or a particular way, that it cannot do anything else.

I do think that if there were another referendum (which I would not necessarily recommend) and if the campaigning followed the lines suggested at this meeting, then the result would almost certainly not be pretty from the Commission’s point of view. I think the Commissioner was a little bit surprised to hear that defiance of authority was considered a virtue in Ireland, even for loyal government supporters.

A lot of people are concerned that foreign investors will do something radical with the Irish banks. But the reality is that this is what is required. Our banking is not anything like as efficient as it could be and our bankers are nowhere near as smart as they thought they were. If the sector does not restructure itself now, it will have restructuring forced upon it by competition from across the eurozone within a few years. It is worth reading what former Bank of Ireland CEO Michael Soden has said. Leaving things the way they are is just not an option.

The most likely explanation is that Dublin Bus is feeling the effect of migrant workers leaving Ireland. The increase in bus passenger numbers in recent years was the result of immigrants, not the result of people leaving their cars behind.

The Department of Transport, which pays a large subsidy to Dublin Bus now has to accept that despite extensive marketing efforts, Dublin Bus management largely failed to entice drivers out of their cars. The problem is that the service DB provides just isn’t suited to the modern city and the modern commuter.

It’s not a capacity problem anymore. There is now overcapacity on Dublin’s Buses. Throwing more vehicles at the problem won’t solve anything. The whole public transport system of Dublin, in particular of the bus service that forms the core, needs to be completely redesigned to meet twenty-first century needs.

Until they get the money, they won’t be able to lend money to businesses, and that will result in unnecessary bankruptcies and undermine whatever growth there is in the economy..  I am just after hearing about a business that can’t raise a ten thousand euro overdraft - the lack of facilities will stop this business from growing. (Bill Cullen agrees with me, so obviously it must be true.)

There is also a deeper problem. There is little innovation in banking and an awful lot of old nonsense. It needs new blood and serious changes. The government recognises this in its decision to appoint new people to bank boards, but it doesn’t look to be a very effective move. For one thing, it’s hard to find knowledgeable people who aren’t already involved in a bank and therefore conflicted, and for another, it’s hard for the directors to actually do anything once appointed.

What is really needed is more and better competition in banking. But instead of stimulating that, the government has now effectively made it impossible to enter the Irish banking market, since it is unwilling to advance its guarantee to new banks. It has also made it impossible for existing banks to innovate very much, because they are now under the constraints that the new guarantee brings.

The government seems to think that foreign money will save the day. If it does, it could create a whole raft of new issues to deal with, and further government guarantees are likely to be required all the same. It also seems obvious that if it were possible to raise foreign private capital so easily, that it would have happened in the UK already. But it hasn’t. Barclays, which didn’t take up the UK Treasury’s recapitalisation scheme, is in a major spot of bother over its own bright idea, to bring in middle eastern investors.
It is an imperfect problem, and there are no perfect solutions. But the government needs to act reasonably quickly and accept the scale of the problem in order to avoid the meltdown spreading fa beyond the building sector. Everyone needs to be realistic here, even if the truth (that the government is going to have to somehow take over a pile of overvalued assets) is not very attractive.

The organizers are pretty open to ideas about how to get the community more involved next year. Any thoughts or views?