Ireland changed its approach to business to keep its children home
by Suzanne Bates deseret news · KSL.comKEY TAKEAWAYS
- Ireland revamped its tax structure to retain citizens and attract businesses.
- Gov. Cox, on a trade mission, praises Ireland's economic growth as a model for Utah's development.
- Utah aims to enhance collaboration between business government and education for job growth.
GALWAY — As the members of a Utah trade mission make their way across Ireland, their Irish hosts have lined up to welcome them with their lovely, lilting accents and friendly, open way.
The trade mission is led by Gov. Spencer Cox and includes other lawmakers and members of the business community. They're here to learn and to make connections in this country, which bills itself as the gateway to Europe.
Ireland got assertive in its openness to business a few decades ago. When asked why, they'll explain it's because they wanted to stop their family and other loved ones from leaving. While Ireland is growing now, it still has millions fewer residents than it had before the Great Famine in the 1800s, with many of those millions making their way to the United States. They left behind parents, siblings and grandparents — splitting families across the ocean.
To stop the exodus and give their children a reason to stay, over the course of several decades, the Irish changed their tax structure and began courting businesses to come, build and grow in Ireland.
At a stop in Galway on Friday, the Utah delegation sat in a classroom at the University of Galway. Professors and administrators explained the synergy here between government, higher education and industry designed to keep that growth alive. After the presentation, the questions and answers flew back and forth between the Utah visitors and their Irish hosts.
In an interview with the Deseret News in a campus lab later on Friday, Gov. Cox praised the work Ireland has done with economic development, saying it's one of the reasons Utah lawmakers come here to learn.
"Ireland's a true success story, from a place with a declining population to now one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union. That should be a model for everyone, a place where they're doing something different and doing it right," he said. "And of course, some of that is tax policy, but it's more than that. I heard this from several companies who said, yeah, we came here maybe because of the low taxes, but that's not why we've stayed and grown here. It's because of the talent. It's the people."
Utahns similarly want a state where their kids can stay and build their lives, Cox said.
"We did a major study several years ago, and that was the No. 1 fear that came back, that people will grow old without their family around them," he said. "And so we're trying to create an environment that is healthy, that is entrepreneur-friendly, so that our kids and grandkids can have jobs and homes."
To keep families together, Utah also focuses on economic development and job growth, developing a similar ecosystem with a synergy between business, government and higher ed, Cox said.
"I remember the U.S. Chamber of Commerce once said that the secret sauce in Utah is collaboration," he said. "There's something about community working together. Everyone knows each other. … I think that is the thing that we have in common (with Ireland).
"What they've gotten better at here in Ireland over the past few years is being intentional about the collaboration."
Getting students into the workforce before graduation
Cox pointed to the co-op model at the University of Galway, where students in many degree programs are required to spend months working for a local business as part of their studies. Galway is a hub for medical technology and life sciences, industries also important in Utah, and the university and government agencies have deliberately built out their academic research and government programs to support the industry.
The combined efforts paid off, with manufacturing and research jobs at businesses like Medtronic, which recently acquired Utah-based business Scientia Vascular, and Merit Medical, headquartered in Utah, continuing to expand in the Irish port city.
While Utah universities have adopted the co-op model — in part because of what lawmakers learned on an earlier visit to Ireland — Cox said he doesn't want students to wait until their last year to get out into the workplace. It's a conversation he said he's had with University of Utah President Taylor Randall.
"And what he's found, and what others are finding, is if you can move those up to year one or year two, that hunger comes in because (students) recognize that there's a reason for the learning," Cox said. "And then the learning becomes easier, becomes stickier — they're excited to learn because they know they've been in the workplace."
After a trip earlier this year to Switzerland and Germany, Cox is focused on getting students real-world experience even earlier through apprenticeship programs in high schools. It's something Utah implemented over the past few years, but Cox would like to see expanded.
"One of the mistakes we've made is underestimating the potential of young people," he said. "When our grandparents were young, they were doing very sophisticated, harder things at a younger age. When I was younger, I was doing that. I was working summers, doing very technical work. I was splicing cable at age 16 by myself. And now that's something kids aren't doing till they're 24, 25. We can give them those opportunities earlier and they'll succeed."
Change is happening fast
While Utah leaders focus on fostering greater economic development, people in Utah and across the United States are growing resistant to the rapid change happening all around them. The backlash to artificial intelligence and data centers is evidence of the growing unrest and uncertainty people are feeling.
"Change is always hard, and it'll always be hard for human beings. What's important is not to let go of the best of who you are and what makes Utah special. We don't want to change Utah. We don't want to turn Utah into California or into Ireland. … We focus on the virtues that made us who we are: family, hard work," Cox said.
"Those are the types of things — collaboration, community — that are really special to Utah, that we want to preserve. And then we hope to apply those virtues to what is coming, whether that's artificial intelligence (or) quantum computing, whatever those new things are, we want to make sure we're applying our values to those things."
The state is preparing for the next wave of technology, in part through the Nucleus Initiative, run by Jefferson Moss, a former state lawmaker who is also the executive director of the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity.
Nucleus is set up to do what is similarly done in Ireland — creating opportunities for government, business and higher ed to work together. In part, its mission is to help speed up the process to keep pace with the needs of industry and to match the research strengths found at the state's universities with the know-how of state agencies and businesses.
"Each of our universities have different strengths. We've actually commercialized out of all of our universities," Moss said. "But then we help them through a program called MarketEdge, where we actually take these researchers through an eight-week course where we help them think through, how do I think about this from a market perspective, how do I create the right team, how do I generate profits — all of those things. We help train them on how to do that."
One of the initiatives Nucleus will help run in the coming months is the Utah Quantum Initiative, created through an executive order signed by the governor in August. It's an effort to speed up the research and commercial product development around quantum technology, which applies the principles of quantum physics to sensing, computing and communications.
In Dublin on Wednesday, Cox joined Moss; Ortwin Hess, co-director of Rinn Quantum, a national research center hosted at Trinity College Dublin, Brigham Young University Prof. Ryan Camacho, and University of Utah Prof. Orly Alter to sign a memorandum of understanding on quantum technology.
Camacho, a member of the trade mission who previously spent a semester in Ireland as a visiting professor, said he returned to strengthen the bonds between Utah and Ireland in the race to take quantum technology from the lab to real-world commercial products.
Camacho has been leading a national effort on U.S.-Ireland quantum collaborations and praised Utah's forward-thinking approach in taking quantum research to the next level.
"Ireland's strengths and recent investments in quantum technologies make it an ideal partner for Utah," Camacho told the Deseret News. "We look forward to working with its universities and tech companies to really move the needle on breakthrough technologies. It's a credit to our state government to come here and make this happen."
Moss is looking ahead too, ready to build on the learnings from this trip to Ireland. He said he admires how institutions here are flipping the model on bringing researchers and industry together by starting with the problems businesses are facing, then helping to build collaborations to find solutions.
"We can move even quicker," Moss said, pointing to the state's plans for Convergence Point, a campus at The Point in Draper where entrepreneurs, researchers and state agencies will physically meet to make things happen.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.