Past Performance No Guarantee of Future Results

The Industrial Development Authority (IDA) is probably Ireland’s most successful state agency. It has been the cornerstone of industrial policy for over fifty years and is rightly proud of its success in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). It might come as a surprise to the board of the IDA, and an embarrassment to the Department of Finance, to learn that the former was once regarded by the latter as ‘a gang of crack-pot socialist planners’. The finance view was that the IDA’s board of non-civil servants should not have it within their remit to ‘run or plan industry or any branch thereof’.