Business Chit Chat thread

Feedback is not compulsory I’m afraid. 🙄

Jesus, 5 months since the last contribution. We need to talk more 😋

Was meaning to post this all week but love A Post’s new digital stamp. A game changer.

Was in Tesco’s Clarehall branch during the week. Quiet as a mouse with people wandering around with empty baskets trying to find where stuff is now. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Can a business be a work of art?

I was talking to the managing partner of an IP law firm about an idea I have that ‘would change the way the world does business’. Do you know what he said?

I was going to do that! 😝

Huge opportunities lie ahead for Ireland as a destination. But we need to be brave and do something different.

We were the first country in the world to ban smoking indoors so we should ban smoking/vaping cannabis. 50% of the world hate the smell of cannabis. No smell in Ireland. 😋

admin: post snipped.

Writing’s been on the wall since the outbreak of COVID but David McWilliams is finally calling it……

Shure they’ll never notish. 😂

The funeral of Eddie O’Connor, the Irish energy entrepreneur, takes place today.

The Currency have been running several articles this week outlining what he achieved in business and how official Ireland thwarted his ambitions to the detriment of this country.

Here’s the last few paras from the lead article today from Stephen Kinsella, their Economics guy…….

The foundation of national prosperity for Ireland

Offshore wind is Ithe foundation for national prosperity for this country. It really is that simple, but it takes time to get your head around it all. It took me quite a while, at least. It’s the sheer scale of it. For example, the total span of a single set of blades on a 16MW rig is four times the area of Croke Park, and we need multiples of those built off the west coast. 

The physics of the energy generation from the west of Ireland and the engineering of the transmission problem across Ireland and out to Europe are pretty well known. What is not known is how, precisely, to get it all done. 

The prize is tantalising. Even if 90 per cent of the claims made by offshore wind’s proponents were the purest bullshit dreamt up by fervent liars and the kind of snake oil salesmen who can’t lie straight in bed, the economic opportunity is still worth bending our policy system to achieve it.

We don’t yet even have a coherent offshore planning system, never mind institutions aimed at developing an installed manufacturing base for the huge blades or a robust R&D capacity to improve these platforms over time. 

O’Connor wanted “an IDA for offshore wind”. His ideas not only state the problem but give the solutions. Grant planning. Install turbine and blade manufacturing facilities close to ports like Foynes, and think very big indeed. Dedicate research infrastructure to the problem. Get moving and make lots of money available along the way to resource it all. 

The ambition is lacking. Where is the government entity driving deployment of wind energy? Where is the institute dedicated to the study of wind energy? UCC has Marei, a Science Foundation Ireland-funded centre that has the study of wind energy as part of its remit, but even Marei with 200 affiliated researchers is subscale and lacking focus.

Perhaps the biggest single datapoint to show the lack of seriousness is the average price of a house in Foynes. Were there serious interest in making offshore wind a reality, the price of land would explode there. According to the property price register, it is not exactly gold rush season there. 

We should not lose heart just because something hasn’t happened yet. It means the opportunity still exists for individuals, for companies and for the state. O’Connor showed us the way, we just have to have the ambition to walk it and we’re sorted.

RIP Eddie 

Ok, you’ve posted about this a couple of times now. Do you have an answer?

This could also replace SWIFT. Small world. 😋

Hello Mr AI. Any other posts here you’d like to comment on?