When Alastair Blair assumed the reins of Accenture’s Irish operation in September 2014, the country’s economic fortunes were beginning to reverse. The Irish recovery was fragile but real, driven by an unprecedented influx of foreign capital and the continued expansion of tech multinationals and pharmaceutical giants. Slowly, surely, the demons of the financial crash were being exorcised.

Blair had a ringside seat in that crisis. He served as head of Accenture’s UK banking practice between 2010 and 2012, followed by a two-year stint as managing director of its financial services division in both the UK and Ireland. In both roles, he had worked on spinning out, separating, and shuttering different divisions of different financial institutions.

“At the time it felt like going from the top of the mountain, hurtling downhill,” he says. Now, though, with the benefit of hindsight, he has a more nuanced view of the crisis: “It was just a complete rationalisation of balance sheets and everything that went with it.”

If his former role gave him an understanding of Ireland’s economic calamity, his current role has given him a deep insight into the subsequent recovery. And Accenture, a leading professional services firm and a corporate trouble-shooter for both domestic and international businesses, has benefitted more than most from the dramatic rebound.

Accenture’s headcount tells its own story. When Blair took over as country managing director, the firm had 1,500 staff. Today, this has swollen to a hefty 5,000, making it comfortably one of largest private sector employers in the state.

Some is attributable to acquisitions – it acquired Cork life sciences firm ESP in 2019, having snapped up the creative agency Rothco the year before. But mostly, the growth has been organic, with Accenture scaling its team to service its growing list of clients.

Blair tells me that the life sciences area has been particularly prolific for the firm, but that growth has generally been across the board. Indeed, as recently as June, it announced it was creating a further 500 jobs over the next three years, most based around a new regional hub in Cork, although some will be in Dublin at the company’s innovation centre, The Dock, and at Accenture Labs.

If anything, Blair acknowledges that the company’s growth has mirrored the wider economic revival. “To quote Dickens,” he says, “I would have seen the best of times and the worst of times.”

However, Ireland is now moving into a new period – one that Blair expects to be both challenging and exciting. The 12.5 per cent tax rate has been surrendered, while Covid has forced companies to both reassess their business model and their relationship with the customer. It has also changed the dynamic between employers and employees, and between business and government. Meanwhile, businesses the world over are trying to address systemic issues such as sustainability and the environment.

Blair, articulate and thoughtful throughout the course of our lengthy interview, has considered all of these issues, and he is adamant that Ireland can adapt to, and deal with, them if everyone works together. “I am not a braggy optimist, but I am an optimist,” he says.

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Alastair Blair was in Washington DC when Leo Varadkar, then the Taoiseach, stood on the steps of Blair House in the US capital to announce the first pandemic shutdown. Even hours before, he had no real sense of the seismic events to come. Hours later, however, he was asked to leave his building. “You have got to go, you have to leave now,” he was told.

Accenture was well placed to deal with the world of remote working. It had the technology and the systems in place. Immediately, it began working with its clients to help them adapt. “People genuinely pulled together,” Blair says, adding: “The level of trust was the thing that really struck me in those first three months.”

Looking back now, Blair remains struck by the response of Ireland Inc. “We had to adapt as communities to not being  able to see each other. That’s weird in Ireland. But the speed at which a lot of companies, organisations and markets adapted and responded was breath-taking – I think even compared to what I’ve heard from other countries. It is the greatest single change in human behaviour any will see in our lifetimes. Some very good, some obviously horrific,” he says.

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As head of Accenture, Alastair Blair spends much of his time looking to the future. The business provides a suite of services such as technology, management and business consultancy to a range of public and private sector clients, and that means Blair needs to focus on the emerging trends, opportunities and issues that will impact them.

But to understand the future, Blair has spent a lot of time thinking about the immediate past, especially how the pandemic has altered both business and society. 

“It is something that is really on our minds. Actually, we had a meeting about this last week,” he tells me. “People use the word resilience. And that can be a little throwaway. But if you look at the resilience of some of the industries we work in, you will have seen so much resilience”.

The pandemic has also changed the state itself. It has swelled, grown in size and scope, and used its financial ballast to subsidise the economy for a huge period. This was particularly evident with the various Covid wage supports.

Blair was president of the employers’ group Ibec for much of the Covid period, only stepping down in September. During his presidency, he wrote a column for The Currency arguing that the pandemic offered an opportunity for stakeholders in government, industry and education to come together and re-define Ireland in this new digital era.

He wrote: “We can do better than just endure this crisis – we can endeavour to come through it with better businesses, a better economy, and a better society.”

A year later, it is a theme he returns to in this interview, arguing that we need to rebalance the state’s massive injection of funds into the economy to ensure that it places the country in a position to benefit in a post-pandemic world.

“Of course, government had to play that role during the period when we had a bit of life support going on – April, May, June, July, August. I think the real challenge now is what we invest in, and how to ensure that we have the appropriate structures in place to support business and vice versa. And that will all play out in the sustainability space in my view,” he says.

“If we’re going to invest in national infrastructure, if we are going to invest in the National Development Plan, there needs to be a balance struck that supports communities, but also businesses, and then the types of business model we’re going to have going forward.”

“We have to grab the good things out of the pandemic and make the most of our positioning in a good way”

Alastair Blair

Blair cites the two examples of life sciences and pharmaceuticals. “We need to make sure we double down on that as a country. One, because it’s great to have it. Two, because they are great jobs. Three, the rest of the world needs it and we’re very, very good in life sciences, pharma, and increasingly medical devices. So, I think that it’s high value, and it’s incredibly important. That coupled with food, agri etc will go through a transformation, there’s just no two ways about that. So, we need to enable that. We also need to make sure the right structures are in place,” he says. 

“And then of course, the last piece is how we generate the appropriate amounts of electricity, where we generate it, how we distribute it, the upgrade to the grid. There was a little bit of life support going on last year. Hopefully we get through the next 12 months, so we can continue to support businesses where they may need it. But actually, we’re in a three, five, seven-year period now where more investment is being needed here in Ireland.”

I put it to Blair that the government’s sustainability agenda is somewhat at odds with our policy of allowing tech giants to build huge numbers of data centres, and that this issue reflects the inherent tension between industrial and environmental policy.

“I think we’re going to end up with a lot of paradoxes at a moment in time. As long as we’ve got a clearer picture of what’s really important, in terms of the type of community and the type of country we want to be, what we want to stand for, and what we want to leave behind.

“My generation probably wants to make sure we undo or redress some of the challenges or some of the problems we have created. But I have to say, we’re quite heavily involved in COP26. And that gives us great encouragement. Are the challenges and the problems insurmountable? No way. They are absolutely surmountable.”

However, for it to happen, Blair acknowledges that we need an “all of” approach, where there is complete buy-in from all families of the economy and of government. 

“It won’t be about just more wind farms, or it won’t be just about cutting out this or that, or changing our model to do only this or that. It’s an all of. When presented with a challenge, I’ve never seen us as a country, in my 30 years working, not respond to it. We might struggle and battle, argue with each other, but actually we pull together remarkably as a smaller country with a real sense of what we’re about.”

Life after 12.5% and the battle for talent

When I mention tax to Alastair Blair, he immediately responds by talking about talent. It has been a familiar refrain from the business community in recent months, who argue that Ireland’s talent pool will help compensate for the loss of the 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate.

“Sometimes we forget what we have in terms of talent. It is mind bending, some of the skills and some of the ability to attract talent,” he says.

Blair also pointed to the issue of tax certainty. “Tax is one feature. All people want as a business, global or local, is certainty. It’s really important, because we’ve been so politically stable, so geopolitically stable, we have been an open economy. And I think if you give certainty to people, the really important factors come into play. And I think talent is primary.

“Now climate and other agendas, and our positioning on that, will become incredibly important from a reputation point of view, because you can’t say we’re solid on these factors, and then we don’t care about the climate. But honestly, the tax changes for me are important that we have certainty. That’s why I think that the 15 per cent is important. 

“The talent agenda is where it really, really, really is at. And I don’t say that glibly. I mean, we wouldn’t have 5000 people in Ireland, working with us or more, if we couldn’t get the talent. There’s a statement of the obvious.”

But there is currently a battle for talent. Young businesses are competing with large multinationals for in vogue skills. Regardless of who you talk to, most accept that there is a battle to attract and retain the right talent in the right areas.

“There are real hotspots. Is there a deficit more broadly? I would put it down to real hotspots for talent,” Blair says.

“We need two things. One is to accelerate the changes we’re making in second and third level. That takes a while obviously, that’s not immediate. Then the second thing is to open different pathways like apprenticeships and beyond. 

“And then the other aspect has to be to make sure we keep Ireland competitive and affordable to come here and live. So obviously housing is vitally important for both young people and people of a certain age who want to come here. But the competitiveness aspects are really important over a two-year three-year period. Right now, it’s just about accelerating people, and retraining as well. Final point – retraining is really important. Because the pandemic has created a situation where some skills are less needed.”

Sustainability, inclusivity, and the future

Alastair Blair talks a lot about sustainability. Not just sustainability in terms of the environment or ecology. Instead, it is about working with companies about the sustainability of their business models going into the future. 

He argues the environmental agenda is part of that clearly, but it also includes other areas like the rapid, condensed change within the workforce, consumer demands and technological advancements.

“We’re not a consulting firm, we’re not really a technology firm on its own. Most of the work we do with clients is to help them solve some of their bigger problems. And that’s a very grand statement. But actually, it’s an amalgam now for the challenges or the problems clients are facing, and they are usually around growth, or the sustainability of it. Sustainability with a proper bracket around because it isn’t just the ecological or the environmental side of it,” he says.

It is a topic he returns to: “In two or three years’ time, we want to have helped clients navigate or find their way through what will be an unbelievably rapid set of changes in technology in their workforce, in the way they govern their business. And then the final massive change is what is coming over the hill, with consumer behaviours, purchasing behaviours, because people want things done, cheaper, or certainly better and more sustainable.”

To get there, he argues that we need an open mind for new ideas and new ways of doing things. “We need policies that allow us to work in the new world,” he says. “Now, that’s a very grand comment. We are an incredibly open economy. Therefore, we need an incredibly open mind to what’s going on in the rest of the world. 

“I’d love to see some of the talent that’s been away come back here, because I think we could bring brilliance back from abroad. 

“And I would love to see us continue to be an open place. This is dead serious for us. We’ve got to commit to diversity in all of its forms, gender diversity, acceptance of those as norms. It’s magnificent, what’s happened in this country in our support of LGBT+, but also on the refugee side of things. I mean, there are many extraordinary things happening, we need to make sure we provide pathways to work in that area. 

“And we need to stay open minded and open as an economy and open for talent from everywhere. We have 90 plus nationalities in our business in Ireland. 90 plus. I can confidently predict when I joined, we had people from Belfast, Cork and Dublin. But the value of that; you can’t put a value on that level of diversity and that level of different ways of looking at problems.”

I put it to Blair that he is decidedly upbeat about the future: “We have to grab the good things out of the pandemic and make the most of our positioning in a good way and make the most of it for the next generation. Because that’s our job. Isn’t it?”