The silver bullet

At the recent Global Economic Forum held at Dublin Castle, President Clinton told us that there is no single initiative that will solve our problems but instead, “There are dozens and dozens of things we need to do and those things need to be worked out by people like you working together and exploring options and seeing how to do them.”

He was right. There is no single silver bullet. We need lots of ideas around which lots of people can collaborate and create a momentum powerful enough to start moving the growth needle in the right direction.

One such idea is The Irish Sun newspaper’s  initiative ‘Get Ireland Working’ and another earlier in the year was TV3’s ‘Every Job Counts’.  ‘Local Heros’ from RTE is another which will be launching the coming weeks. All of these initiatives  need to be applauded. They are examples of organisations walking the talk, doing something to tackle the scourge of unemployment facing  familes and communities all over Ireland. 

In these challenging times we need to be thinking about how can we leverage the opportunity the media industry represents to rally, spread and galavanise support around  the dozens of  ideas that will shape the recovery President Clinton was talking about.

Take Hireland for example. In order to to succeed it needs to spark a wave of imaginative thinking and practical action that tackles unemployment on a massive scale. That means people in living rooms, offices, pubs, clubs  and organsiations thinking, talking and acting differently to create job opportunities  themselves or to shake out ideas about how other people they know could create a job for someone. With the help of the media industry Hireland can reach and motivate  all those people to take action and report back on the results.

Hireland is one of the ideas President Clinton was talking about last week in Dublin and we have a very special silver bullet of our own – a media industry  who are willing to give this movement wings.