Most wishful thinkers are suggesting we’ll see an election next year. I don’t know if we will, to be honest. No party wants to go to the country at the moment. You can tell this because neither Eamon Gilmore nor Enda Kenny are effectively putting the boot in.
University rankings were published today. They contained some good news. UCC and NUIG are on the up. They contained some bad news. UCD, Trinity and DCU are all on the way down. Comments about them included “knowledge, what knowledge economy, funding, student-staff ratio”. All that sort of stuff.
We’re told that the knowledge economy is what will drag us out of the economic quagmire. This may be so but I will need to check something with the average canvassing party operative when they knock on my door. I will ask them if they know what the knowledge economy is. I am almost 100% certain that they will not.
Oh wait – as I am typing this, Enda Kenny has apparently said that FG is on “election footing”. They’re having some sort of a love-in down in Waterford, it would appear, if the Irish Times is to be believed. I do recommend a look to see if the photograph is still there.
The country cannot afford to have Fianna Fail in office any longer, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny declared today.
I’ll bet he did. This is the Enda Kenny that more than half the country sent packing at the last election, who was the subject of a hilariously comic putsch courtesy of Richard Bruton. Bad and all as Fianna Fail and the Green Party are, not enough people were convinced by the value of Change under FG the last time. It was hardly surprising. They ran a shamefully amateurish campaign. Anyway I guess he’s looking for an opportunity to answer the question:
What is the knowledge economy?
Well, the way I see it, if we had the building bricks to build a knowledge economy, we wouldn’t have built economic armageddon. We wouldn’t have been paying construction workers double what we paid IT developers. We wouldn’t have been swearing blind you couldn’t lose on property. There would have been no pyramid schemes in Cork. We wouldn’t be screaming about problems in maths standards. More 18 year olds would be studying science, IT, engineering and information management systems than currently are. Law would not have had perennially high points. Accountants would not be allowed to make long term strategic decisions. And people who had something to invent might be able to find seed funding in Ireland, regardless of whether they were finished a 4 year college course or not.
The knowledge economy is dependent on people having ideas and having resources to try and implement them. We are good at the ideas. You can see this in the Young Scientist Exhibition every year. You can see it on blogs here and there. We are massively talented in shooting down the people who have those ideas.
We need a cultural change. We need to understand that with the knowledge economy comes risk. We need people to want to take those risks. We need them to take those risks in exportable ideas. We need skills exchanges for things like this. I know someone who had an idea for an iPhone application but who a) couldn’t write the code to do it herself but worse still b) didn’t know where to find someone locally to do it.
A couple of the colleges have some incubation centres but they are nowhere near being done on the scale that is necessary to build a knowledge economy. They get funded to the tune of hundreds of thousands of euros while we are pouring 25billion euro plus into a bankrupt bank.
When you get canvassed, especially if you get canvassed by a member of one of the government parties ask them what the knowledge economy is and how their policies will bring it about. I bet you they won’t have a clue.
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