Down to Business Paper Roundup November 14th

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Down To Business with Bobby Kerr on News Talk, sponsored by Bank of Ireland.

Emmet Oliver (0:08)

The paper is, of course, reflecting a lot of the last few days and slightly edgy atmosphere around the country. So joining me is an esteemed panel, as I've already described them, Lorcan Allen, who is the managing director of Keating & Associates, and Louisa Meehan of Woodview HRM. Folks, you're very welcome. You must get a badge for even turning up here today if you read some of the headlines over the last few days. It's been a kind of an end of world vibe about the whole thing. Lorcan, if I come to you first just to kind of wrap up on these EU meetings that have been going on, we have a story in the Irish Independent, Aisling Maloney talking about exactly that traffic chaos, hoax, bomb threats, and of course, an eye-watering bill at the end of these EU meetings with all the leaders who came in, including President Zelensky. So should we say, well done? It was a lot better than we all thought because some of the predictions about these events from a few weeks ago, it was going to be absolute pandemonium, it was going to be Russian hybrid attacks.

Stuff has happened, but overall it seems to have been staged well and managed well.

Lorcan Allen (1:05)

It does, Emmet. It seems like it went off very well.

Like most people, the city centre, anyone living or working around Dublin would have been aware that this was coming and you could gradually see over the week that things were starting to tighten up and our businesses in the city centre, we just worked from home for the two days because we were kind of became clear that there was no point in going in. But just watching the proceedings, it does seem to have gone well and it's important I suppose for Ireland to be hosting events like this occasionally. They're not things that are directly often relevant to us, some of the national issues that we have. It's much more big picture geopolitical discussions that are going, but it speaks to Ireland's soft power to be able to host these events and to be a good broker of discussions around it. I suppose what it is interesting is to remind us of things that maybe we forget day to day in terms of what's driving it. Like, the Ukraine war is five years ongoing now.

We occasionally refer to it in our maybe media reporting, but this is probably bringing it to our doorstep where you have the leaders from countries that, I suppose like, this is on their doorstep, Finland, Latvia, Poland, all those countries where they're living this day in, day out. It's the biggest concern they have. I suppose when Brexit was affecting us, maybe those countries would have felt, they're always going on about Poland or Brexit, but does it ever?

Emmet Oliver (2:27)

Yeah, and I had this sense of, oh, well, what's happening with Russia doesn't affect us, but it does because we have planes in the sky looking for potentially Russian drones. We have worries about bomb scares in schools. So it's not affecting us in terms of direct military conflict, Louisa, but it is sort of impacting us in other ways, more subtle ways.

Louisa Meehan (2:44)

No, it really is. And I think we have to consider within Europe, we are all interconnected, we are all interdependent. And having Zelensky here as part of this conference is really important to the light for conversations that I'm sure happened behind the scenes with many world leaders, both within Europe and outside of Europe. The focus on trying to move towards peace is important to people who live in this country, even if we can't feel what's happening in Ukraine or see it up close and personal.

Having peace in Ukraine matters to how we live our life here in Ireland, it matters to our security, our cybersecurity and our access to food, all kinds of different things. So it is very important. And I think it's also worth noting that the army bomb disposal unit was brought to Maryland Square. So there was a crude but viable device. So whilst a lot of the security measures that took place dealt with hoaxes like the scares in the schools, thank goodness, there was a real threat.

And so seeing the level of security that was put in place by the guards and the civil servants that looked after it, I think it's been an incredibly successful event and incredibly important that we have hosted it. There was a focus on peace, a focus on AI, and a focus on money, which impacts on all of those areas. So overall, I think it was a successful event.