A ‘Near America Experience®’

Jackie Maguire, Chief Executive, Meath County Council

23^rd January 2017

 President Trump and Meath

As we in Meath drive our #MakeItMeath campaign to attract jobs to an area of Europe we claim to be ‘most business friendly’ we have become aware of the ferocious competition for jobs from right around the world. And it’s understandable, for me anyway, that the US’s elected leader, President Trump, would try to attract as many jobs to areas in the States like the so-called ‘Rust Belt’ where technological advances have made the type of work once done there redundant.

Fit for business

The nature of work is forever evolving. Robots have replaced much of the manual work that was done in those factories, like auto makers, that have long ago shut down. Trump or no Trump that work will never re-appear. That’s why training and re-training is essential, to keep us all ‘fit’ for current industry demands.

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg

American philanthropy has been good for helping ease world hunger and tackling diseases like HIV and malaria. American billionaires have poured countless dollars into furthering these worthy causes. Many billions of dollars have been spent by really clever people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. So it’s a mystery to me why these people don’t encourage, cajole or push the American government to spend billions of Federal (or their private) funds to retrain those people whose livelihoods have disappeared when their industries were bypassed by the technology that made those tech billions in the first place?

We’re training the best

When US companies like Facebook or Alltech, that have chosen to #MakeItMeath, are looking for new locations to site their businesses, one of their key considerations is the availability of a skilled workforce. As a public servant, it’s not for me to have a view on whether Irish government industrial policy over the years has been good or bad, but one thing that can’t be disputed is that we are producing many, many thousands of highly trained graduates every year, who are ready to fill technically challenging positions.

A ‘Near America Experience®’

There’s hardly a family in the entire of Meath that doesn’t have some family connections with the US. Most of us would see Americans as family, albeit sometimes distant. We have no interest in taking American jobs but for those companies that need an EU base we do offer what I’m going to register as ‘A Near American Experience®’. We’re the closest an American company can get to being in the US while still being in the EU. That makes us pretty unique – and a great place to base an American business satellite. Make sure to tell the ‘family’ we were asking after them.