EY CEO Outlook: Economics and Optimism with Danny McCoy, CEO of Ibec

Richard: Thanks Carol. Danny, you're very welcome. You're associated for so long with Ibec. Prior to that, the ESRI working in the centre of Dublin. But you're a Tuam boy. You grew up in Tuam in County Galway. What was that like as a town to grow up in?

Danny: Well, move from one capital of Ireland to the other capital of Ireland! I loved it, actually. You know, I loved it at the time, and I certainly love it in retrospect as well, because it was quite urban. Ironically, Tuam in the 1970s and 1980s, because in the west of Ireland, you know, it had a sugar factory. So it was a bit of industrialisation, which was relatively unique in the west of Ireland at that time. And also the ecclesiastical aspect of it meant there was lots of schools and boarders coming from all kinds of exotic places, like Belmullet.

Richard: You guys were townies. There was a real townie feel ...

Danny: Urbanites I'd like to call us, and I was a mod as well during the 80s, you know. So living the dream without the Vespa.

Richard: You were that Tuam mod, were you?

Danny: Yes, indeed.

Richard: The 1970s and 80s, the west of Ireland and Galway - the economy was in a pretty rough state at that time, kind of wearing your economist hat, reflecting back on those childhood years. What do you recall of it?

Danny: I think that's actually implicitly what drew me to economics. You know, I wouldn't have been able to articulate that at the time. So from a family of plumbers. So I kind of saw the SME, you know, small business aspects at the kitchen table, but then also that industrial complex that was the sugar factory, which was always closing down and always on the verge of collapse and always big marches to Dublin and so on. So it seemed to me that by osmosis, I picked up that there's something here that actually matters to people, and it involves industrial base. And I wouldn't have been able to express it as competitiveness or socio-economic factors, but I think it actually did feed into me. And, you know, it was pretty grim, as you said in the 1980s. It seemed pretty hopeless, you know. In contrast, I'm sure we're going to talk about it as to where we are now and have some perspective. But I just really enjoyed business subjects and that kind of led me down that route.

Richard: Inevitably growing up we're all influenced by people. It might be our parents, it might be wider family. It might be somebody, you know, a teacher who influenced you?

Danny: I was influenced by many people. No one stands out. I mean, I had a teacher, Mr. Gardner, in the CBS in Tuam, which, you know, taught me the commerce and business. And I guess that he probably was the most influential person at that time. But I think the primes were actually coming from the society more generally, and the kind of angst that was there about job losses and the kind of hopelessness. And it was clear that to me, that economist, the idea of an economist was, was something that was held in high regard, not today, but back then, you know, T.K. Whitaker would be mentioned with great deification. And he was an economist. It was even before the Tallis Report. But you had the Buchanan reports. And as you listen to the news, the Economist was the expert, and the economists were coming down to see whether the sugar factory could survive or not. So I guess from that prime, I thought an economist was an important job.

Richard: It had an appeal and a sense of prestige about it.

Danny: Exactly I didn't know what they did. That's not quite. Not quite sure even now, but, um.

Richard: Well, well, if you don't know, at this stage, I don't want to break the news to you, but. So you pursued that and you went to university, you studied, and you ended up working then in the central bank as an economist and then later the ESRI. What was that like in terms of that kind of academic environment in which you would have been working? It was about analysis and it was about projections, and it was about a very non-commercial world to operate in.

Danny: Yeah and just in passing, I should say, because I think it's kind of relevant now as well, in some of my views, is that during my school years, the role models I saw from Tuam that had succeeded had actually gone into the army, into the cadets, and I wanted to join the cadets and went all the way actually to the final part and lost to my eyesight. And I actually have a great respect for defense and security, which I think is a really big issue at the moment as well. But to the point that you asked me, I did commerce in Galway and then went into central banking, it was very half of my career, has been quite academic and, you know, up to the point of joining Ibec and particularly becoming the CEO there, I would have had the theory of business and contextualize it in a more macro level. But I enjoyed it. You know, I enjoyed the academic part of the, you know, there's always a price and a quantity knocking around somewhere. And, you know, when you're ...

Richard: Potential for a graph?

Danny: Exactly. And actually, you know, a bit like the weather in business, if you say to somebody how's business? You know, it's a bit like talking about the weather. They'll come back and they'll give you a hook. They might not realise it, you know, they'll say something and you'll go, well, how are the margins? Or you know, and you start to and suddenly with about four sentences, you look like you're deeply immersed in their business, that you're empathetic to it and so on. And, but and what comes from that is having that analytical framework that those graphs and economics gives you. There's always a price and a quantity. They may not be called price, but may be called yield, or they might be called volume or whatever.

Richard: Or a few extra quid or something like that someone might say.

Danny: So it's everywhere.

Richard: And what was it about Ibec then, having been immersed in that more academic world for quite some time, what appealed to you about Ibec and the Ibec job becoming CEO?

Danny: In truth it, I was pretty much a starter jobs in academia, you know, both in London and lectured at Oxford and then came back central bank, ESRI. I was pretty much into my mid 30s with not much advancement in terms of promotions or whatever, so and I enjoyed that. But at that stage, Ibec seemed to me to be when the opportunity arose and made a decision in 15 minutes, effectively I was called into the then leader of Ibec, Turlough O'Sullivan. I thought he was going to be giving out to me about a minimum wage report the ESRI had done, and he just said, look, Brian Geoghegan, a great man, Brian was leaving Ibec and would I be interested in his job? And I went out the door and called Ailish and we said yes immediately. So it was. So. I've always been capable of making quick decisions in that regard, in terms of career. You know, I'd have jumped, as I said, flatlined from places. My first break was in DCU, actually got a lectureship and I could have stayed there. You know, it was a good, permanent, pensionable opportunity.

Richard: Why not? What was it about ...

Danny: I went back to being a research assistant at the ESRI. I think going back to that, to the ESRI was a brand that I thought, well, that's where economists are definitely in my 1970s view of the world. And wouldn't that be great for my CV? And the reason I like the central bank was I actually loved that Sam Stevenson building, as I used to walk through Temple Bar and say it'd be pretty cool to work in there, and they have economists in there as well.

Richard: And it was pretty cool and going into Ibec, Ibec has this very distinctive and very large presence in the business landscape in Ireland, not only because of the scale and number of businesses it represents. It's a lobby group, it's an educational facility. It's involved in so many different things. And of course, being one of the social partners in the big days of social partnership, how did it feel to you taking on all of that?

Danny: Yeah, so I really enjoyed it in terms of the richness of it. And in fact, on joining Ibec, I didn't fully understand it. So for instance, in the name, we tend to use the brand Ibec now, but it's the Irish Business and Employers Confederation. There's a little bit of an ampersand in the middle there, and that's actually quite significant in terms of when I arrived, there was an issue about the E part was really large, the employer part. And still the media will say, you know, employers organisation Ibec or business representative organisation, but it's actually the two bits combined. And again because we allow these terms drift in there. But if you think about it defining something as an employer, the counterpart is an employee, but business is way more than just providing work to employees, important as that is an important stakeholder. There's, you know, there's all kinds of functions from finance to marketing to public affairs, etc.. And I think my task certainly when the CEO role came up after about four years being in there, was to make the B the business part as significant as the employer part and try and make them pari passu, because prior to that, as you said, social partnership had redefined Ibec it was the E part that was very dominant.

Richard: One of the things that you looked at was the business model of the organisation itself, the finances. There was a pension deficit. There were a number of challenges that really had to be grappled with.

Danny: Yeah. And in fairness to those who built it, before I arrived, Ibec was a very substantial business when I joined it. I took over in 2009, and we'd gone through the recession and lots of costs had been taken out of Ibec itself in terms of lost colleagues and so on along the way in terms of redundancies. So a lot of the hard yards had been done by the management team, which I was a part of prior to me being the leader. But even at that stage, Ibec had about 150, 180 employees. It had multiple brands, which I'll come back to in a moment. So it was a substantial business at that point, bigger than most people would have anticipated. We did turn it around as a business. We ran it like a business since then because we had, as you said, a defined benefit pension deficit which had priced to market, had gone out to 42 million of a deficit and our turnover was 18 million at the time. So we were a going concern issue. So in terms of business as the CEO, apart from the public profile, there's a huge amount of work to try to turn Ibec around into a sustainable place in a proposition. Now, we've been lucky in one level, the business model has just been so exponential here in the last number of years. And you could argue it was like shooting fish in a barrel. And if that be the case, there are lots of people who missed those fish and we didn't. So Ibec now a 50 million turnover business with 330 staff. We're in ten locations and we have 39 brands that we own. So it's a very substantial business.

Richard: A lot of these different moving parts. As an Economist, Economists often get criticized and slagged for being too pessimistic. And it's the dismal science and all of that. You tend to be quite optimistic, because I remember when you talk about 2009 bumping into you shortly after that time when the country was really, really in a bad way. And I remember and you spoke publicly about it at the time, that you had a sense of optimism about the country's ability to get out of that economic crisis we were in and to get out of it reasonably quickly. And that has been borne out. And you're one of the few people that was articulating that at that time. What about now? Are you an optimist about the future?

Danny: I kind of think I'm a realist, right? Maybe contrarian. Okay, maybe just contrary.

Richard: You were going against what everybody was saying.

Danny: I tend to be contrarian in that sense, that I try to assess the situations as they are. And I think there's a little bit of, um, you know, groupthink goes on and try to challenge some of the norms and, you know, even this week we can probably talk about it. I don't believe that the word crisis, applies on some of the issues we're dealing with at the moment. There are crises, but not the ones we're identifying. So back then, I could see from the data and I could see from the conversations we were having in the summer of 2009 that the Irish economy had turned around. Lots of hard things had been done, even including the Ibec story, as I said. We started to see the the first aspects that actually in the property market around the winter of 2006, you know, and into 2007, the workers weren't coming back, breakfast were old man had checked out of the Maxol, at that stage. So those two years 07 and 08, there's huge adjustment took place. And so we're competitive again. Our unit labor costs were down and all we required was for the world economy to start to pick up. And it did. Right after the great financial crash, we started to see this bounce back. So I was actually just proclaiming, you know, it was very obvious. But when you got into this narrative of kind of a doom loop of nobody wanted to say it, you know, and I was talking to business leaders saying, you know, our business is actually doing okay, but we realize our supply chain aren't. But then you talk to somebody down the supply chain, they said the same thing. They just weren't capable of unleashing this.

Richard: Putting it together. Well, having talked about your own career prior to Ibec and all of the things that you've done since you took over as CEO there, we're going to hear a little bit about your take on the Irish economy and what the future might hold. But first, have a listen to this.

Richard: When you look at now, the economy is in a very different place. It's in a very, very good place. The economy's going well. We've full employment. What about the future? Now there are lots of risks out there.

Danny: There are lots of risks out there. And, you know, so even going back to when I first started professionally, there's always been a story about some meteor coming for Ireland, right? You know, we're going to be taken out in one fell swoop. And that hasn't happened thus far. And I don't believe it will in the short term to medium term here. Now, I think most of our issues are actually we've got control of our destiny. I hear all about Trump coming and you know, AI and so lots of threats and the world is moving back to protectionism. I actually think the seeds of our destruction potentially are under our control. And the seeds of us actually doing something right for the future, also under our control. But you, first of all, have to identify the situation as it is.

Richard: One of the things that really throws business is uncertainty. And there is definitely a lot of uncertainty. There are a lot of unknowns. Let's say, for example, about Trump, let's say, for example, about what that government his government might do vis-à-vis tariffs and the impact it might have on foreign direct investment. Do you see that as a real threat, or do you think the reality might be a version of that, but not the apocalyptic vision that some people talk about?

Danny: I think the big strength of anybody in leadership is to be able to distinguish the signal from the noise, and that's what I worry about at the moment, is that we have so much focus on noise and not quite getting the signal. And so our obsession about the United States is understandable at one level. But Trump administration at this moment is now a known unknown. Like we know he’s going to be president. We kind of know the kind of shape it's unknown the specific aspects of it. A known known at the moment is the near-collapse in the French and German business models and economy as a result, in the club we're in. And there's very little discussion about how Europe is going to get itself out of its wave. And these are known knowns. Uncertainties about Europe is losing competitors, the Draghi report and so on. You know, so I think the Draghi report is actually much more significant than anything Donald Trump.

Richard: So in a way you think that partially because of media, maybe we're looking in the wrong place or we're looking too much in one place and we're not looking at a potentially serious situation right on our doorstep in the EU with some of those bigger economies like Germany or France.

Danny: Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you look at where the European Union is going, where it needs to go, it needs to advance security as the premium underpinning for the business model. And that is beginning to happen. And that security means that some of our international positioning, particularly our neutrality, is really out of step with the business model, not just with social model, because what the Draghi report and Von der Leyen's commission is going to do is they're basically going to put aside state aid rules and state aid rules were there to protect small economies like Ireland, where big ones could use their purchasing power effectively or muscle. And those state aid rules will be set aside for matters of defence and security. And I think that's a really big issue for Ireland. And that doesn't mean boots on the ground or soldiers going off anywhere. This is about, you know, a lot of the wars are in the cyber space now and we, you know, have a big technology footprint here and we will be involved. And the question is, can we be consistent in terms of not being hypocritical, that we actually are not neutral? We actually are for Western civilization and the values of globalisation and liberalism. And we now have the resources to back that up.

Richard: So you think we're not actually neutral in reality? Let's just get on with it.

Danny: Well, I think we have to our actions and our words need to be consistent. And I think that's my biggest fear at the moment is that we've got potential hypocrisy here. It was okay that we could be poor and popular. You can't be rich and popular. You've got to be rich and responsible and we're not. You know, our defense expenditures are pitiful. It's about 0.3% of our GDP. And their overseas development aid while we champion it, it too is pitiful. We're getting resources from around the world here by the business model we have. And we should say we didn't set the rules, but we're beneficiaries of it. And in fact, if you stood back from it, we're colonizers, you know, because when you look at the evidence, what were the colonizers of before they ended up with resources from other jurisdictions to the benefit of their societies? We're a modern day colonizer. We're intangible assets through corporate restructuring has come here, and we see that with the scale of the corporate tax revenue.

Richard: We're getting the benefit of that from all the countries.

Danny: That means we should be responsible with it as well.

Richard: Do you think that we have a problem in Ireland with properly planning for the long term. Are we a little bit too? I'm thinking about infrastructure. I'm thinking about aging population, future pension deficits, all these kinds of things that are longer term things. We tend to think in the short term. And why? If so, why do you think that is?

Danny: Well, I think you could do quite a fair bit of sociology.

Richard: Psychology.

Danny: Yeah, I actually took a module in sociology in Galway, which the president, Michael D Higgins, lectured on. There was a chapter on deviance. So I'd like to tell people I learned my deviance from the President of Ireland. If you think about that kind of class structure idea, just give you an idea as to why we are kind of position we're in, is that we missed the industrialization in the Republic of Ireland, not so much in Northern Ireland and around that industrial base. Sociologically, you either get the workers, the proletariat and the capital owners, the bourgeoisie, and there's an element of that in the north. In the South, we're in between. We were petty bourgeois. And the petty bourgeois tend to use the educational system to try to advance themselves in terms of social class. And we've been up to that now for a century as you kind of go from agrarian to working for EY. So in that regard, we tend to be very heavily property right nutters as well, you know, really protecting. So that's why we didn't burn the bondholders. And that was one of the very big things of why we took off, certainty, you know, Ireland don't mess around with international commitments and so on, which is an issue, I think, more modern day people wondering where is Ireland's positions coming from in the world at the moment, which I think is going to give us some problems in the future. And in that regard, we didn't have an industrial base, so we educated people to advance and tragically advance in other societies through emigration. And so nobody was kind of going planning for a bigger Ireland, a more populous Ireland and so on. You know, we're the only place on earth, the island of Ireland, to have a lower population today than in the 1840s, there was 1 billion people in the world in the 1840s, so pro rata we’re really low. We've got a great diaspora, but even that diaspora we’re losing touch, I would think, to Ireland.

Richard: So because of that history, because of that social class system, as you have outlined it. In a way, we became very good at being survivors. Now we've moved beyond that in terms of the economic prosperity and wealth that has been built up, and we need to plan for the future. So to some extent, is there a lack of confidence or is it, as you mentioned earlier, this idea that we always think we're going to get hit by some meteor, so therefore we respond accordingly, as opposed to thinking and having the confidence to plan well into the future.

Danny: I think that we've ended up being too successful. So what I mean by that is that, again, just to hark back to the 1970s for a moment. In the 1970s, the state is made up, in my view, of three kind of units the government, public sector, the households and the corporates. And in the 1970s, all of those were poor. Right. But the government part was potentially the one that was relatively better off to be able to build. You know, not going back to Ardnacrusha, but even just to jump from analogue to digital to start to put in the, you know, the RTCs or whatever it might be. Now we have this same mindset that we think the government is more powerful than the households or the corporates, and that couldn't be further from the truth. The balance sheets of the households and the balance sheets of the corporates mean they're able to outbid the government in many projects. So just take, for instance, the Children's Hospital, like, you know, let's not get into the modalities of that, but it's where there was no other demand on the electrical and mechanical, labor costs there. But you had Intel pumping in 17 billion just up the road. You look down towards the Liffey, you can see there's lots of things going on that can outbid the government in lots of things or force up the price.

Danny: And households are able to outbid the state as well, particularly with childcare. If somebody hires a nanny to mind their kids, they're not available for the creche to do a few families. And we're seeing this all the time that the under acknowledgement by the government, particularly in the electoral cycle, that even though relative to other governments around the world, they're certainly better off, they're actually struggling in their own economy to compete with the private sector. And we saw that, you know, in terms of the headcount, we pretty much have the same amount of public servants as we had 15 years ago, and we've pretty much a million extra private sector workers. And the things that we want from a government, when you're rich, like we are as a society, are personified. We want lower teacher ratios for our children. We want more access to GPs, Radiographers. We need more security on our streets in terms of guards relative to population. And it's at this particular point we're seeing that the stuff that really mattered in the election is the delivery of tangible public services and public infrastructure.

Richard: You're talking through your role in Ibec to CEOs all the time. What do you see from talking to them as the big challenges that Ireland faces in the years ahead?

Danny: So, in the short term you know, they'll say the things that we all know about in terms of housing, the health system, the education system and the planning system. Okay. So, let's just get that out of the way. That's the kind of short-term aspect. I think what they're worried about is a long term, consistent plan for what the economy is going to do in the structural things. So, one of the things will be energy. Where are we going to get our energy from? And so, the whole debates around offshore wind or solar or whatever. But then in addition, what's that energy going to be used for in the short-term issues like data centres and so on? Do we have a long-term planning? Going back to your original point, even beyond the next 3 or 4 years, what's our North Star? What are we going to use the money that we have now to ensure that there's sustainability for future generations. And I think that conversation is gone.

Richard: Do you think the conversation is gone. It's not happening at all.

Danny: It's gone, it's not even there. One of the things that really depressed me on budget night, the usual aspect was if a family had got the kind of resources we had and the unexpected resources. So take, you know, Apple, clearly one off pieces as opposed to recurring corporate tax we're observing. Somebody would, at least in the family who might have done it, would have said, should we give any of this to charity or do something a little bit more noble? And there wasn't a jot of that. Everybody had their snouts in the trough and were unhappy in this largesse. Nobody said, if we're pronouncing on international affairs like in terms of Palestine, the state of Palestine, would we think about using some resources to help another society or take Nigeria for a moment. In the international protection you know, we had Jordanians and Nigerians were mentioned on that. I can assure you in terms of Nigeria, they bought more iPhones and more Apple apps over the number of years to contribute to the profitability that we were getting the money for. And we see no consistency between our treatment of returning people to an unsafe Britain. But we changed the rules and say it is safe now and you can be returned, like we're very narrow.

Richard: One of the things, and there's been a lot of discussion about it, is short-term thinking in relation to the likes of the Apple money or other budget surpluses that are there, and whether or not that money should be used to help people in the short term with cost-of-living issues. What's been described as the cost-of-living crisis. You question the use of that phrase?

Danny: I question the word crisis in this. So there's no doubt that the cost of living has gone up in Ireland and the price levels are high here. But there's two sides to the equation there. What's been happening incomes. So incomes in Ireland are also increased very substantially and are high too. And how do they compute against each other. We see that over the last decade in particular, we see that incomes have outpaced prices. And the government in going to the electorate are empathising on a cost-of-living crisis. But it's not everybody's story. There are people and families who genuinely are struggling, and they should be directing resources to them, but we don't. So you give something to everybody.

Richard: You think some of the measures, because they're not means tested or targeted sufficiently, people are benefiting who maybe don't need to benefit. And is that the best way to spend the money?

Danny: Yeah, one of the criticisms I'm getting about this issue is it's the crisis piece that, as I said, is the issue. Somebody said in the media, if 10% of the households in Ireland were flooded, would that not be a crisis? And the answer to that is yes, it would, but only for those 10%. You know, you wouldn't give buckets to the other 90% in the consequence somebody has a flood in their area. You'd actually have the capacity to use nine times those resources to people that actually need it for the same overall cost, and that's not how we're behaving. And so the idea that we have a crisis is not matched up by the fact that our savings ratios go up. If there was a cost-of-living crisis, people would try to smooth out their income. You would actually see savings go down to try to confront the higher prices by trying to keep your living standards up. We're seeing the exact opposite. Savings are rising substantially because people are consuming less. And the question then is why are they consuming less? And they tell us in the consumer surveys, they tell us four things as to why they're saving more and spending somewhat less of their income proportionately, is they're environmentally concerned, their lifestyle changes in terms of health and well-being and just kind of changing patterns. They want experiences. They'd rather go out and spend five times on something than go out five times. The first one is they actually say they're satiated. They're saying how many more flat screen TVs or sofas or things, stuff do you want me to buy? Because that level. Now, that's not everybody's story, but it's the vast majority story or come up with some percentage.

Richard: Well, inevitably when you make that argument, people who are not in that situation will say, what's he talking about? That's not me. He's pie in the sky. He's living in a different world.

Danny: Yeah. So, well, you've got to kind of keep him down with the Joneses phenomenon going on in Ireland. Right. But, you know, empathy is to be able to put yourself in the shoes for the experience that you think others are suffering. It's completely different when you appropriate their experience and say, yeah, that's me too, when it clearly isn't. And so you can be empathetic, but you don't have to pretend that you're going through this. And the evidence is out there. And I use an example on the airport, just on 32 million. Never mind the cap for a moment, just the sheer quantity we know business travel hasn't returned to 2019 levels. We know how many tourists in Ireland. Somewhere around 8 or 9 million. So they're not all coming through Dublin Airport. So why is it so high? It's Irish people making five, six, 7 or 8 trips a year. And you know, I said they're not escaping down to Portugal to avoid heating bills in Ireland. I wouldn't think.

Richard: Well, an interesting take and I'm sure probably not a very popular take among some people, but that doesn't bother you anyway. You're quite happy to be the contrarian.

Danny: Well, I think leadership is about leading. It's not about saying they're my followers, so I must follow them. Leadership is actually about telling people we need to go to a much more sustainable level. We might be heading in a direction you mightn’t like to start with. And I think that's our big issue. We're not being led to where we need to go to. It's too easy just to throw money at issues rather than solving what the actual electorate and people want. It's a very difficult thing to do, but true leadership is telling people things that they might not want to hear.

Richard: Well, talking about leadership, there are a few questions that I ask all of the guests on this podcast Danny and I'll throw them at you. You could call it the quickfire round. First up, what CEO or leader do you most admire and why?

Danny: Internationally, I quite like Jamie Dimon. I think the longevity that he's been around and the fact that JP Morgan, under his leadership is now ten times bigger than all ten European banks combined tells a story in itself, but probably domestically. Gary McGann is somebody who I admire quite a lot, and I know Gary over the years. So more locally, Gary McGann would be the answer.

Richard: Okay favourite book or film?

Danny: Book. Let me do a book. The Supreme Court by Ruadhan Mac Cormaic was one of the best books that I read, because it showed me that so much of our social history was actually decided in the Supreme Court, particularly in the 1960s under Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh and so on. And when Ireland was so backward on so many levels, it wasn't our political system that led us into modernity. It was actually through the Supreme Court and I think educated people should know a lot more about what happens constitutionally in terms of interpretation of law. So I thought that was a great book.

Richard: And it's worth looking in that place. Do you have a mantra in life or in business that you find helpful?

Danny: I do have this one, which sounds very cynical. It’s no good turn goes unpunished, right? Don't do stuff on the expectation that you'll be rewarded. But if you know that to be the right thing to do, keep doing it and in time it'll come back to you. But if you're so transactional that you have to have an immediate response from that, then you'll be disappointed, and you would become cynical. So that's my mantra, no good turn goes unpunished.

Richard: When finished the job you're in now CEO of Ibec, what would you like people to say about what you achieved and how you achieved it?

Danny: I like that we articulate it, what was actually happening and what has been a golden age for Irish business, a golden age for Irish society and that Ibec basically championed that and was possibly ahead of the curve, calling it before it became obvious.

Richard: Biggest regret or mistake in life or career?

Danny: I think the biggest mistake actually, just on that same theme, is not being strong enough in articulating the positivity. Didn't actually break through early enough on that narrative that Ireland had recovered. Had to listen to a whole lot of naysayers right up to 2014, I would contend, when it was clearly had turned. In my view, it had already turned in 2009. I wish I was more forthright.

Richard: Well, Danny, it's refreshing to talk to someone who has the strength to be optimistic. Maybe when others are saying the opposite and to call things as it is, when people are going in a different direction, and to actually have a track record of being right as well about so many of these things. It's been a pleasure talking to you and the very best of luck for the future

Danny: Thanks, Richard.

Richard: We hope you're enjoying this EY Podcast CEO outlook series. Remember, you can catch previous interviews we've done with lots of other CEOs. Until the next time, thanks for listening. Bye bye.