On the Emergence of Entrepreneurial Activity – a Longitudinal Regional STUDY 1891 – 2003
Emer Ní Bhrádaigh, Dublin City University
John A. Murray, Trinity College Dublin
More than a century of foundings in a rural, peripheral, minority language (Irish / Gaelic) region in the west of Ireland is examined, from a pre-industrial stage to its current partly-industrialised and increasingly service-based stage. A database of 2,700 records of state-supported individuals and organisations from 1891 to 2003 is analysed to track the emergence of entrepreneurship. Results reveal the importance of institutional, infrastructural and social factors and suggest that entrepreneurship rooted in the local communities has persisted longer.
Introduction & Literature Review
Multi-level, longitudinal research
Entrepreneurship research ranges from micro-level studies of the individual entrepreneur to macro level policy studies and international comparisons (Davidsson & Wicklund, 2001). Macro level research is important since entrepreneurship affects economic and social development (Johnstone & Lionais, 2004) and society, in turn, influences the level of entrepreneurship through its entrepreneurial history and provision of role models (Bygrave & Minniti, 2000).
Nearly two decades ago combined micro and macro level research was called for (Low and MacMillan, 1988) and such multi-level research has been gradually developing, despite the challenges it poses in terms of data gathering and analysis, and theory development. Processual micro-level research incorporating the impact of time has tracked organisations from nascence to foundation to growth while, at a macro level, the process of emergence of populations of enterprises, of new industries and new organisational forms has been documented (Aldrich, 1999; Carroll & Hannan, 2000; Schoonhoven & Romanelli, 2001). Research based on longitudinal research over long periods of time, allows researchers to uncover new insights on triggering events, imprinting and path dependencies that may not otherwise be apparent.
Regional level empirical research (e.g. Special Issue - Regional Studies, 28, 4, 1994), has compared regions. Comparisons spanning decades indicate how regional changes may take a long time (Johnston, 2004). Limited attention has been paid to regions that have lagged in entrepreneurial development and levels of activity. For example, rural, depleted and peripheral regions, often display lower levels of entrepreneurial capital and behaviour, and firm formation (Johnstone & Lionais, 2004) and conventional policy measures may, under such circumstances, produce perverse effects.
The research reported here is a multi-level, longitudinal study of an historically very dis-advantaged and peripheral region, characterised by the added feature of a minority language. The historical scope of the research also seeks to provide an understanding of the initial emergence of organisationally based entrepreneurial activity in a bounded, discrete region.
Entrepreneurial Capital
Audretsch and Keilbach (2004) define entrepreneurial capital as “those factors influencing and shaping an economy’s milieu of agents in such a way as to be conducive to the creation of new firms” (p. 419). Such capital is reflected in the rate of business start-ups, the knowledge-intensity of existing businesses, level of R&D, level of labour productivity, numbers of people engaged in enterprise start-ups. Seen as a subset of social capital, entrepreneurial capital encompasses social and economic networks, values concerning entrepreneurial behaviour, norms that affect entrepreneurial expression, and the institutions that shape and govern society. Some aspects of social capital can inhibit entrepreneurial activity – for example a heavy emphasis on tradition and the status quo may dampen entrepreneurial spirit, and lead potential entrepreneurs to migrate from an area. Similarly, state institutions and their policies might unintentionally dampen entrepreneurial capacity through unintended and perverse effects.
By contrast, an entrepreneurial dynamic, once established may be self-reinforcing. Bygrave and Minniti (2000, 25) hypothesise that “in ‘high-entrepreneurship’ areas, the large concentration of entrepreneurial activity itself is an important factor in an individual’s decision to become or not to become an entrepreneur,” through role models, a pre-existing network and entrepreneurial culture.
Research has attempted to link various aspects of culture with entrepreneurship, such as immigrant groups and more recently indigenous groups (Dana & Anderson, forthcoming). However, there is almost no research linking language and entrepreneurship despite the fact that shared values, beliefs and behaviour of culture are mediated through language. Research on the role of networks in entrepreneurship and on the strong and weak ties entrepreneurs have and use and could be linked with the network research in sociolinguistics (Wei, 2000), tracing the networks within which bi/multi-lingual people operate. In the case of minority languages, it seems likely that an entrepreneur would need to have a command of the majority language of business in order to make use of a wide network of weak links outside his/her own linguistic community. The concept of entrepreneurial capital as a specialised aspect of social capital encompassing relevant aspects of culture, micro-culture and socio-linguistics is used in this study to generate insights into entrepreneurial emergence and evolution in a region with unique social and linguistic features.
Community Level Analysis
Community can also be defined as the level of aggregation above population in ecology based and evolutionary studies (Aldrich, 1999). Organisational community therefore embraces the various organisational populations – usually defined as industry groups – found in a regional or national economy. Community research is difficult because of its scope, yet important in so far as explaining any one population depends on understanding its interactions with adjacent populations (Aldrich, 1999; McKelvey, 1994). Since this study attempts to trace the emergence and evolution of organised entrepreneurial activity over a time span from pre-industrial to “post-industrial” it was expected that some of the normal problems of studying community would be absent since population and community would begin as the same and only gradually diverge into varied populations within the “modern” more diverse regional community. Observing the emergence and evolution of populations of firms (industry sectors), not just firms taken independently, was therefore an objective
The Region
The research was conducted in one geographic region, the County Galway Gaeltacht (name given to areas where Irish (Gaelic) is the primary community language) on the Atlantic west coast of Ireland, stretching west from the suburbs of Galway city. This area, with a current population of 40,237, has been the subject of special status, funding and policies for over a century. In the late 19th century this separate treatment was due to its high levels of poverty and general deprivation. From 1926 to date, its linguistic situation as being primarily Irish-speaking has combined with continuing relative deprivation to attract special public policy treatment.
The Data
The quantitative data for the study consist of organisational demographics for the period 1982 – 2003, primarily organisation foundings and state financial support to such organisations as well as data from the Companies Registration Office (CRO). All limited liability companies must register on incorporation and de-register in the event of closure or bankruptcy.
Data were collected from the Annual Reports of the three statutory organisations charged with the development of the area since the late 19th century, from detailed commissioned baseline reports of 1892, and from an electronic database as described below. The Congested Districts Board (CDB) was established in 1891 by the British Government in response to nationwide civil unrest and agitation, to address chronic poverty and disadvantage in this and other areas, and operated until 1923 when it was disbanded on the foundation of the Republic of Ireland. Congested districts were those deemed to be overpopulated in relation to their agricultural capacity.
From 1923 – 1957, most of the functions of the CDB continued to be carried out by a series of departments in the new government’s central civil service. This data is incorporated only in draft form as archival research of official records is not yet complete.
In 1957, a state agency, Gaeltarra Éireann (“Gaelic products of Ireland”) was established to manage the rural industries operated by various government departments from the 1920s to the 1950s in the Gaeltacht. These industries largely had their roots in the CDB. Due to Gaeltacht community pressure and campaigning, Gaeltarra Éireann was disbanded in 1979 and replaced by a more democratically constituted and governed public agency with wider ranging powers: Údarás na Gaeltachta (the Gaeltacht Development Authority). Data for the periods 1957 - 1979 and 1980 - 1983 have been compiled from annual reports and data for 1983 to 2003 have been sourced from an electronic database provided by Údarás through the offices of Forfás, the national policy advisory board for enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation which collates enterprise development statistics on a national level.
In summary, extensive quantitative data are available for the periods 1891 to 1923, and 1957 to 2003, with preliminary data for the intervening period. Qualitative data is also in the process of being collected from “expert witnesses”, community leaders and influential actors at local and national level who had direct involvement with entrepreneurial activity and policy in the region, but is not incorporated in this paper.
Data Limitations
The sources used are official publications, and give no account of economic activities not directly supported by state policy. For the late 19th / early 20th centuries the activities of individual tradespeople such as blacksmiths, and weavers, and business people such as shopkeepers and merchants are therefore excluded. Data on a considerable segment of “sole-trader” activity is therefore lost. In the latter half of the 20th century, however, other tradespeople are included, such as butchers, electricians, hairdressers and plumbers, and also small scale basic retail services such as cafés, garages, and laundries.
The data and views presented in the official sources, have been complemented with the views of some successful entrepreneurs and community leaders, but require further counterbalance to the official opinion and record, such as Irish language folkore and creative literature.
Methodological Issues
While defining entrepreneurship itself has its challenges, measuring it can be even more difficult (Curran & Blackburn, 2001). This is further complicated when attempting to measure entrepreneurial activity over more than a century from a pre-industrial period with a high level of barter and a non-cash economy, to a post industrial service-based and increasingly internationalised period. The principal measure employed has been foundings. Both individual and organisational foundings are reported. Clearly, foundings have occurred that did not involve such support, but given the ease with which it was available, these are deemed to be very few. Individual foundings represent entrepreneurial activity by one person acting alone. They are not organisational foundings and it is these latter that are of special interest as the are taken to represent core entrepreneurial activity of an organised character, moving beyond the pre-industrial era tradition of individual workshop or cottage industry.
The data for the period 1891 to 1923 are primarily descriptions of activity, rather than identifying a business or an entrepreneur’s name. The data from 1957 onwards include name identification and have been cross checked with the CRO. In this project the birth of an enterprise is the year defined as the year in which grant aid was paid or approved. A similar definitional issue arises with industry sector. Each record was allocated its EU NACE industrial categorisation code, and was also coded according to clusters of particular importance to the region and of interest to the researchers. Where a record could appear in two industry sectors, it was assigned to the category which made most sense in terms of clustering of communities.
The following section is an analysis and commentary on the one figure and two tables presented at the end of the paper to illustrate the emergence of particular industries and organisational forms in the Gaeltacht from 1891 to 2003. Figure 1 illustrates the main communities of organisations which emerged, developed and in some cases have declined over the century in question.
1891 – 1923: Entrepreneurship during the life of the Congested District Board
Table 1 lists the organizations established in each decade from 1891-1923, by the CDB or with its support, and a small number of organizations subsequently established and managed by the various Government departments which took over the CDB’s work on its disbandment. Further archival work is required to complete the data for the 1920s and 1930s. Data for the period 1890s to 1910s are based entirely on CDB assisted enterprises.
Table I indicates the highest level of foundings in cottage industry textile activity, followed by fishing and netmending and then by miscellaneous “other” activity. None of these is of a clearly “industrial” character that would require organisational as opposed to individual entrepreneurship with the exception of machine knitting and some forms of weaving. The profile is not particularly distinguishable from a pre-industrial economy.
The region was poor, remote and untouched by the concurrent second industrial revolution. Economic life was one of household subsistence and attempted self-sufficiency in terms of food and clothing. Most households had, or desired to have, multiple sources of income – typically from inshore fishing and extremely small scale farming (1-2 animals per household and some poultry). A cash economy had not been fully established and much exchange was conducted by barter, primarily with the local shopkeeper who held a particularly powerful and not always positive position in the community. Debt was the norm rather than the exception. The region was not fundamentally different from many rural and peripheral regions of Europe but its poverty was at the extreme end of any scale of deprivation.
The main aim of the CDB was land reform and housing improvement. A lesser amount of its work related to the development of fisheries and rural cottage industries such as crochet, knitting, lace-making, and weaving. These latter “industries” took the form of classes to train young women, many of whom would then work from home. Fisheries also involved training, with the skippers of large fishing vessels employed to provide training as well as skippering. Training in domestic economy was often seen as training for (e)migration to domestic service jobs.
The 1892 baseline reports indicate that at that stage there was no organised fish curing or processing, other than for local use. There were very few markets and cattle fairs took place 4 – 8 times a year. Eight quarries were in operation, generally mining for granite and marble. There were 16 inland fisheries, primarily attached to the houses of the gentry, where they engaged in leisure fishing, with the assistance of over 200 local men employed as gillies. There were hundreds of small rowboats engaged in part time inshore fishing and less than 50 large sailing boats, engaged in fishing and in delivering turf to islands and along the coast.
The 1920s to 1950s
Within two years of the disbandment of the CDB, the Government of the new Republic established a Commission to examine the Irish-speaking areas and to recommend how they could be developed (Government of Ireland, 1926). Records for this period have yet to be fully collated and analysed but a number of enterprises located are listed in Table I. While the CDB had been disbanded, the new Government continued up to as late as the 1950s to treat the congested districts and the Gaeltacht areas separately from the rest of the state. There was a major overlap between the Gaeltacht areas and congested districts, and the current Gaeltacht area (following a legislative reduction in 1956) in Galway still overlaps largely with the former congested districts.
This was a period during which national economic policy turned against international trade and emphasised national self-sufficiency, a process further exaggerated by the impact of WWII. The national economy suffered considerably as a result of the decline in trade and the encouragement of uncompetitive import substitution enterprises. In this context, the general economic fortunes of a disadvantaged area such as the Galway Gaeltacht were further weakened.
From the 60s to the modern period
Gaeltarra Éireann (GÉ) was established in 1957 as a state agency to manage the rural (mainly textile) industries managed by the central Civil Service since 1923. In 1965 legislation was introduced to allow GÉ to support private enterprise. This is the first occasion on which public intervention and public monies are allocated to support directly entrepreneurs in this area. Despite its responsibility for remote regions, GÉ operated from a headquarters in Dublin city until 1968-69 when it was transferred to the County Galway Gaeltacht.
Údarás na Gaeltachta (UnG) was established in 1979 and has local representation for every Gaeltacht area. It operates under the Ministry of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs rather than the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment which has the responsibility for enterprise development for the rest of the country (Ní Bhrádaigh, forthcoming). However it operates under the same legislation in terms of the financial and other support it can provide to entrepreneurs.
Table II reveals a number of evolving features of the region from the 1960s on. The high incidence of support for, and foundings by, individuals rather than organisations is noteworthy. Thus, 61% of recorded “foundings” consist of sole entrepreneurs with no employment content. Some of this may be explained by the provision of support for feasibility studies that may have revealed that a planned business was not viable, or fledgling companies which never grew to the stage of employing more than one individual. It can also be explained in terms of policy that encouraged invididual effort as well as “organised entrepreneurship.”
However, the frequency of sole foundings is also related to sector, being dominated by marine activities – 90% being in this sector. In the other sectors organisational foundings dominate through the decades. Within marine, it can be seen that new activities emerge that are more sophisticated and that add more value: fish farming and processing in particular which account for 50% of the marine company foundings during the period.
During the early period to the mid twentieth century summarised in Table I, the sectoral populations that existed were almost exclusively “inherited” populations of fishing and netmending and of cottage textiles – features of a pre-industrial economy linked to subsistence and merchant dominated outwork. Table II illustrates, several new populations emerging: fish farming, fish and seaweed processing. knitting, garments and carpets, community cooperatives, forestry & joinery, paper, plastics, tourism, audio-visual. By and large these are dominated by company foundings and represent some greater or lesser degree of “value-adding” activity rather than primary extraction or production. Some of these populations have waxed and waned – paper and plastics for example, but others form the basis for the current community ecology of entrepreneurial activity in the region. Thus the pattern of foundings may be seen to move away from its pre-industrial profile to a “modern” one based on a diversifying base of sectoral populations. The evolution towards greater diversity is characterised by some extension of long established patterns (fish farming and processing from subsistence fishing) by the introduction of quite new knowledge and technology (audio-visual / multimedia creative services) and by some dead ends (paper, plastics).
Community & Population
The evolution of the community ecology from a very narrow twofold population base in primary fishing activities and cottage industry based textile “outwork” to a more diverse set of populations in value-adding sectors has been noted above. While some of these “new” populations may be seen as emerging from predecessor populations in primary activities, some are based on new knowledge and technology with no history in the geographic locale. These emergent features are a consequence of the intervention of the state agencies involved through the history of the region and of local endogenous initiative. The various state agencies have attempted to introduce innovation in various forms and ways through the past 120 years, meeting with very little apparent success until the 1960s and after. The first record of what might be regarded as approximating to a corporate or organisation based founding is the three ventures noted in the CDB commissioned baseline reports of 1892 discussed below. The 1960s marked a number of changes that may be important explanations of change. In 1958 the national economy turned its back on protectionist anti-trade economic policy and threw itself with the zeal of the convert into a trade based, international competition oriented public policy commitment that led, in due course to the economy becoming one of the most globalised in the world and to the economic drama of the “Celtic Tiger.” In the 1960s, legislation, for the first time allowed direct financial support for entrepreneurs in the region and, in a new national policy context support for “the entrepreneur” attracted new institutional legitimacy. In the 1960s too, the region organised itself socially in a civil rights movement to demand better infrastructure and education and a counterbalance to its marginalisation as a peripheral curiosity.
The evolution of the “modern” community and the emergence of new populations paints a picture of economic and social inertia for the first half of the 120 years under study and – at least in historical terms – of more rapid change, still in progress, during the latter 50 years. Both change and inertia seem to be explained in part by institutional factors at state and local levels.
Character and Entrepreneurial Capital
The written official records of the early period document that while people worked very hard for long hours, often on a seasonal basis they were easily discouraged, perhaps unsurprising given the dire poverty levels, and pattern of repeated minor famines (O’Neill, 1996), and that organised emigration to America and Canada was one of the primary efforts to improve economic conditions. Although he was a member of the CDB for a while, the well-known public leader Sir Horace Plunkett criticised its paternalistic attitude, and through his work with the Irish Agricultural Co-operative Society promoted a spirit and culture of self-help, and of cultural regeneration as a pre-requisite for economic development (Matthews, 2003).
The detailed baseline reports of 1892 mention two entrepreneurial efforts founded by women, namely a very shortlived knitting project, and a basketmaking enterprise which employed eight boys that year. This latter enterprise failed around 15 years later when the entrepreneur passed it on to her nephew. A third enterprise is recorded. Formed by a priest, Father Flannery, the Connemara Industries Company (Ltd), engaged in knitwear production and employed up to 200 young women. This company failed to survive long or to reach profitability, due to the founder’s death. The community appears to have been unable to continue the founder’s organising activity beyond his death. While this may have been some early emergent form of managerial capitalism, it appears to have been unable to survive the promoter.
These three enterprises are the sum total of organised effort to improve conditions in an area with a population of 52,000 people and are the earliest recorded enterprise foundings in an otherwise pre-industrial society. The CDB reports difficulties with its repeated efforts to attract private capitalists to invest in the area, a difficulty mentioned by GÉ later in the 1960s. The running of the fish curing stations was contracted out to private concerns on occasional years, but the infrastructure required to foster a fully developed industry was never put in place during the Board’s life, resulting sometimes in catches rotting to waste. Boatbuilding was another cottage industry and the Board’s boatbuilding yard on the Aran islands never flourised once tranferred to some of the employees. Once again the absence of any tradition of managerial capitalism seems to have extinguished promising beginnings. It is suggested that these employees preferred to continue with their multiple income sources rather than risk specialising in boatbuilding having neither the role models, market, capital or belief in developing the business beyond a cottage craft industry. This “failure” of social institutions and learning is not so curious if placed in context. Chandler’s documentation of the emergence and rise of managerial capitalism begins in more or less the same period in the centres of the second industrial revolution – the US, Britain, Germany and Japan – and is created by the organisational challenges of growing the new capital intensive, vertically integrated industries that came to dominate the twentieth century. Diffusion of such new knowledge capital occurred slowly beyond these indusries and their locales.
Networks and Difficulties with Innovation
The CDB did not work in isolation and drew upon many people from elsewhere in Ireland and abroad to work in leading roles in its operations - such as skippers and trainers from the east coast of Ireland, Norwegian fish curers, and other skilled individuals in textiles from Scotland, Germany, France and Holland. There was some resentment that outsiders were brought, especially once it was believed that local workers had by then developed the necessary skills for these senior positions and that the CDB did not understand the problems facing the congested areas (Matthews, 2003; Royal Commission, 1908). In the textiles sector the reluctance to adopt new designs in response to market tastes is mentioned both during the CDB and GÉ period, as is the issue of co-operation and consolidation within the sector during the Údarás period. While it is clear that knowledge and technology that is not available locally must be “imported,” these contemporary observations indicate issues with regard to how knowledge can most effectively be introduced to economic and social networks, the overlooking of indigenous local knowledge and capacities, and the potential dangers of being perceived to denigrate those whom it is intended to help.
This difficulty in introducing innovations may be partly be explained by the simple but clear linguistic barrier. In 1911, 79% of the people in the area were Irish speakers, and given the high levels of illiteracy (as high as 60% in the area concerned) (CDB 12th Annual Report, p44), the absence of radio or other telecommunication media, and limited mobility, it can be assumed that the majority of these Irish speakers were monoglots and did not speak English. In its 20th year of operation and having seen the success of the few Irish-speaking teachers it had employed, the CDB introduced a colloquial conversational knowledge of Irish as a minor optional subject in its entry examination for second division clerks. The prime economic institution therefore persisted in attempting to work through English with a non English speaking population – a pattern which apart from GÉ and Údarás, has never quite disappeared from the formal institutional framework of the area (although the community is now essentially bilingual). However, it should be noted that the language difference was not the only reason for the difficulties encountered by the CDB in Galway. Similar conditions characterised another remote Gaelic speaking region in the north west of Ireland (Donegal) but enterprise development began there sooner and more successfully than in Galway, accompanied by a higher uptake of CDB industrial loans.
Financial Capital
One of the major factors universally limiting entrepreneurial activity is lack of financial capital. County Galway also lagged behind the other congested districts in its use of the various loan systems operated directly by the CDB. The Board provided small financial assistance for branches of the Agricultural Co-operative Banks established at the end of the nineteenth century by the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (Table I). The aforementioned Plunkett was a board member of both organisations. A total of 17 banks was established in County Galway in imitation of the successful Raffeisen Banks in Germany which adressed similar rural conditions. This social movement ultimately failed within 2 – 3 decades. Various reasons suggested include a lack of savings in a subsistence agricultural area, weak management, social networks so strong that there was an unwillingness to take action on defaulters, a lack of involvement of the local leaders (such as priests and schoolmasters), and the fact that the loans were seen as a conduit for Government loans rather than as an investment in the local area (Guinnane, 1994). Essentially the Banks failed to achieve the social legitimacy required to flourish.
Success can be measured in a number of ways. While the shortest-lived organisations were those least rooted in the local area and its assets they provided much needed employment and assisted in the transition from agrarian self-sufficiency to modern employment. Given the extreme poverty and disadvantage in the area, it is not surprising that any form of indigenous social organisational effort did not emerge until the late 1960s when the Gaeltacht Civil Rights organisation campaigned for several infrastructural, economic and linguistic issues.
Longstanding Issues
A number of issues re-present themselves throughout the century from the pre-industrial stage to the post-industrial stage. Factors preventing entrepreneurial behaviour which have endured for up to a century include infrastructural weaknesses, the failure to innovate, to accept innovation or to be able to absorb innovation, high levels of disadvantage such as unemployment, low education levels, high emigration and dependency on multiple sources of income where no one source was sufficient for survival (CDB, 1892; Kane, 1973; Údarás na Gaeltachta, 1986). This latter behaviour may have prevented the late 19th century fishermen from engaging in open sea fishing to compete with their stronger competitors both in Ireland and internationally, or more recently the development of the tourism sector beyond the highly seasonal Irish summer colleges, much less larger scale enterprises. All three official bodies (CDB; GÉ & Údarás) and officially commissioned studies (Kane, 1973; Watson et al 1998) comment on the lack of interest in the available well-paid employment initially in textiles and later in a wider variety of factories with many potential employees choosing emigration over local employment. It is suggested that other factors such social and cultural life, freedom from a traditional society and from parents, and the attractions of travel and urban living were more attractive than the prospects of local employment. It may be that the more able, more ambitious people saw emigration as a means of advancing. They may well have also been the more entrepreneurial people.
Many of the successes are rooted in “bottom-up” community-rooted efforts. While the CDB was a result of rural agitation it ultimately failed to engage fully with the local community and thus many of its projects failed. The Gaeltacht Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s spawned the emergence of the co-operative movement in the early 1970s, which led initially to infrastructural improvements; the foundation of the democratically elected Údarás, and later to co-operative fish farming enterprises. These two long-living organisational forms are more rooted in the local (human) community than the shortlived organisational form of non-indigenous manufacturing plants with an average life-span of under 10 years. The successful national Irish language television station TG4, established in 1996, has its roots in a pirate television station which briefly broadcast in the late 1970s, and is rooted in the competitive advantage of the area, namely the Irish language. While the marine resources sector is well developed in terms of fishing and primary processing, it is far less developed in terms of the non-traditional activities of value-added products and tourism. Only 10% of the Gaeltacht fish catch is processed beyond primary processing in the Gaeltacht itself.
One of the longest surviving communities of organisations in the Galway Gaeltacht is the Irish summer colleges of which there are 14, the earliest founded in 1910. These 14 colleges are entirely rooted in the local communities, involving up to 200 housewives, catering for over 7,000 teenage students and 155,000 bednights each summer, but are highly seasonal and heavily dependent on state subsidy. However they are of key sociocultural and linguistic significance. They were primarily established by, and are owned and run by school teachers (Ní Bhádaigh, 2006). Yet while tourism has been a key objective of Udarás since the 1980s, the sector remains largely underdeveloped. Údarás invests heavily in a subsidiary tourism promotion organisation operating from its own offices essentially staffed by its own staff, instead of encouraging the tourism entrepreneurs to develop the industry themselves via stronger product and market development, networking, linkage and clustering.
Institutional factors have emerged as being more important factors in this research project than had originally been expected. Many seem to have had an adverse effect on the development of an entrepreneurial culture and of new communities of organisations in the region. There is no Gaeltacht based business organisation (such as a Chamber of Commerce) and in the case of the Galway Gaeltacht only one full-time bank, and until the late 1990s no third level educational institution. The Government policy of encouraging native Irish speakers to become teachers (Kelly, 2002) may have diverted some of those with entrepreneurial capacity into the education system – a factor most evident in the success of the Irish colleges. The association of the Irish language with the preservation of traditional culture and ways of life and the state strategy of treating the Gaeltacht separately from the rest of the country may have dampened the entrepreneurial potential of the area. The continued administering of small grants directly to individual fishermen and seaweed gatherers may encourage individual effort rather than collaborative effort. One highly successful tourism sector entrepreneur interviewed initially did not see herself as an entrepreneur and then apologetically admitted she had no option but to see herself as an entrepreneur (Ní Bhrádaigh, 2006). The social legitimacy of an entrepreneurial culture is still in emergence.
CONTACT: Emer Ní Bhrádaigh; Fiontar, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland; (T): +353 1 700 8101; (F): +353 1 700 5690; emer.nibhradaigh@dcu.ie
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