The President of Engineers Ireland, Dr Chris Horn, has said that Irish society is reeling from past arrogant incompetence but now must focus on ingenuity and more effective regulation to rebuild towards a just and prosperous future. He was speaking on the first day of the Engineers Ireland Conference 2010 in Cork.

"As a result of the failures in our society and in our systems, many of the public are disillusioned and frankly apprehensive about the future," said Dr Horn.

"Professionals in many disciplines, from banking, to medicine to the religious have been damaged by scandals. There are many investigations to be had, many fingers to be pointed and many lessons to be learnt. But life must go on too. There is a time and place for post mortems on the Celtic Tiger but our current national priority must be on urgently rebuilding our economy."

He continued: "This time the rebuilding must be done within a framework of systems, within processes and with robust regulation. Professional engineers have much - especially now - to contribute to Ireland. Engineering considers systems in a holistic way, building in stress tests and fail-safe alternatives, and by using ingenuity and experience to overcome challenging problems in the interest of society at large. As well as being directly relevant to realising the aspirations of the Smart Economy and Innovation Taskforce proposals, these principles are relevant to Irish nation as a whole. The vision of the Innovation Taskforce, that by 2020 Ireland will have a significant number of large, world leading, innovation-intensive companies, will only be possible if we can improve our processes - the ingenuity of engineers is integral to this."

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Dr Horn also warned that developed countries like Ireland were now in danger of losing out to developing nations not only in terms of cost but also as a result of the disruptive innovations that these economies were spreading to the West.

“Emerging countries are no longer just doing things cheaply," he said.

"They're also embracing a spirit of ingenuity and creativity. They're innovating too by re-designing products and making commercial breakthroughs in everything from health-care to telecommunications. The BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) countries are actually streamlining and improving whole business processes to achieve results even more effectively than competitors like Ireland in developed countries. Consequently, we have to innovate if we are to compete and win. Engineers are the epitome of this creativity and ingenuity and will underpin this."

(NS/CD)