Bob Schneider is a Partner in 
Wilson So is the Director of Hitachi Consulting Corporation XBRL Ireland: Has the Celtic Tiger Lost Its Roar?
Written by Conor O’Kelly Posted on July 10, 2007
Conor O’Kelly is the Chairman of XBRL Ireland and represents Ireland on the International Steering Committee. He is currently 1st Vice Chairman of XBRL International. He has ten years’ background in global IT managed services, global project management, and strategic IT business planning with Hewlett-Packard and Ericsson. Mr. O’Kelly is a Chartered Accountant with an MSc in IT Management and a past member of the Council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland.
Thursday 14th June 2007 saw the surprise re-election of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern as Ireland’s Prime Minister for an unprecedented third term. The Teflon Taoiseach, born and reared on Dublin’s modest working-class north side, had survived public scrutiny of his failed marriage and his personal finances in the days before the Irish election by his parliamentary partners, the Progressive Democrats (PD). The result? The collapse of the PDs as a political force in Ireland. Why? Because after 20 years of economic prosperity, Ahern had led Ireland to be the economic envy of Europe. The people were happy with Bertie and why fix what isn’t broken?
Ireland’s high profile prosperity has been built on successive Irish government policies in the 1980s and 1990s of public-private partnership, investment in infrastructure, attracting inward US multinational investment, a favorable tax regime, building a world class technology sector, and resolving thorny Constitutional claims to Northern Ireland with the UK. Flagship firms answered. Dell, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, and Vodafone committed multibillion-dollar investments in European facilities servicing the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) regions from Ireland. Coupled with this was European Union-sponsored investment in road, rail, and telecommunications infrastructure and a policy that embraced the Information Society.
The highly successful XML-based Revenue Online Service (ROS) was launched by the Revenue Commissioners (the Irish Tax Authority) as was REACH, the agency reporting to Ahern’s Department of the Taoiseach, to develop Ireland’s information society. Electronic filing of tax returns through http://www.ros.ie/ has proven a role model in electronic tax administration.
However, recent developments have cooled the Celtic Tiger’s roar. The 10 new EU member states welcomed by Ahern at the European Union Enlargement Ceremony in Dublin in May 2004 now seek to emulate Ireland’s success. Attempts to introduce electronic voting during the last round of elections proved spectacularly unsuccessful and the voting machines were mothballed. The government-sponsored Digital Hub, developed with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has failed to make its mark. The highly anticipated Dublin Port Tunnel, the second-longest urban underground tunnel in Europe linking Dublin Airport to Dublin Sea Port, opened late and over budget (cost $1 billion), having failed to anticipate the size of new Super Trucks which now don’t fit into the tunnel. Mounting house price inflation has placed housing all but out of reach of the young population.
The days of US President Bill Clinton and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern swiping smart cards in the multilingual Gateway EMEA Support Centre to digitally sign inter-government agreements in September 1998 are now a distant memory. The Gateway factory has closed and Clinton is gone.
So what has happened to the promise that XBRL ushered in, when, in the same year, XBRL Ireland took root within working groups in the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland? Forging ahead on a wave of enthusiasm that the information society offered, XBRL Ireland developed a number of proof on concept v1 taxonomies. Spurred on by the wave of confidence flowing over the country, the band of merry men (and women) generated proof of concept instance documents using Microsoft Notepad. Further development continued on a series of v2 taxonomies as the limitations of v1 became known and further recruits were enrolled. XBRL Ireland launched one of the first XBRL jurisdictions in Europe in 2004 with good buy-in from the main regulators, tax agency, companies registration office, Big 4 accounting firms, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland, a jurisdiction and thought leadership seen as being ahead of its time.
Prevailing sense amongst Irish government decision makers now call for proven business cases, evidence of widespread market adoption, ease of use, and a well documented cost benefit analysis. Projects not meeting these requirements are off the agenda. So Ireland has adopted a “wait and see” strategy. Keenly watching developments in neighbouring UK where the UK Government has mandated filing from 2011 and regularly exchanging notes with the Dutch Government’s NTP (Netherlands Taxonomy Project), project policy makers are happy to let others do the heavy lifting in bringing XBRL to the market . At the moment, XBRL Ireland is a solution without a problem.
The XBRL Ireland team, happy to wait it out, have exported their knowledge and best practice to emerging jurisdictions. Irish attendees were amongst the best represented of the May 2007 CEBS COREP/FINREP in Munich Germany. They contribute regularly within the working groups of the XBRL International Consortium and took the lead at training workshops during the 15th XBRL International Conference. Behind the scenes Irish members have been vocal in their support of XBRL amongst several European Community regulators to drive regional efficiencies in electronic reporting. Indeed, XBRL Ireland currently occupies the Vice Chair of XBRL International and is currently driving emerging policy within Europe.
With Irish government attention focused on ensuring the economy doesn’t overheat nor lose its enviable economic position in Europe, XBRL is a solution without a problem. But that doesn’t stop the small island nation punching above its weight on the international XBRL stage.