The hard part was getting the broad-based consensus from labour, management, the public and politicians to move forward. That took courage, decisiveness and planning.”That strikes me as the real story of economic reform – whether it is Ireland, the United States, Asia or Europe – it takes courage, it takes planning and it takes action In Ireland, thoughtful political leadership carried the day. Good fiscal policies including income tax rate cuts, government spending restraint and education reforms led to terrific economic growth in that country. They’ve had nearly 8 per cent growth a year for the past 11 years. They’ve cut tax rates and reduced expenditures and deficits.Some say Ireland benefited from good fortune I say they benefited from good policy. Ireland is proof-positive that pro-growth, free-market policies work..

When my Hungarian cousin Zsuzsi was learning English at school in Budapest she used to complain that you had to learn each word three times: first its meaning; then how to pronounce it; then how to spell it. As English reaches an unassailable hegemony as the international language, the lovable lunacies of English spelling are taxing millions of brains across the world Not that that deters anyone. When the Iron Curtain fell, Zsuzsi and her friends instantly dropped Russian (until then compulsory in Hungarian schools) and took up English. There simply wouldn’t be any problems for the contestants to grapple with.The wild phonetic inconsistency of English was classically illustrated by George Bernard Shaw, playwright, socialist and fanatical advocate of spelling reform. He pointed out that if English spelling were phonetically consistent the spelling of “fish” might be “ghoti”. That is gh as in “laugh”, o as in “women” and ti as in “station”.The chaos of English spelling is perhaps best illustrated not by the obviously difficult words that pop up in spelling bees, the ones most people cheerfully admit they cannot spell, but by the words people think they can spell but can’t This newspaper’s style book contains a list of them. Here it is: accommodation; bureaucracy; canister; clamouring; dignitary; embarrass; expatriate; harass; inoculate; linchpin; marshal; manoeuvre; millennium; minuscule; predilection; publicly; statutory; supersede; tranquillity; unforeseen.

Try that on your friends and family: I have never found anyone who scored 100 per cent, even people who pride themselves on being good spellers.But what an absurd idea that is. Why should anybody take pride in being able to spell properly? Is it not insane that such a simple thing as writing your own language is difficult enough to take pride in?The trouble is that the reasons for English spelling being so annoying are also among the reasons why it is such a rich and poetic language. Some will even enslave people in sweat-shops and effectively – as in the Holocaust and in Darfur – aid and abet murder.Only one group has opposed the corporations facilitating the murder in Sudan with any success, at least when it comes to brokering a fragile peace in the south. When corporations operate outside democracies, they will acknowledge no moral limits, and nobody can make them They will pursue profit at any price.

But its desire for profit must be kept in careful balance with other human necessities; too often, it is not.Even within broadly democratic countries like the US, we can see how corporations try to buy up the institutions of a free society – politicians and the press – and encourage them to turn a blind eye to (or even deny) life-and-death issues such as man-made climate change.But democratic citizens can, if they have the will, restrain them. Just as Hitler could not have operated such efficient gas chambers without IBM’s technology, Khartoum could not be waging such effective and large-scale genocides without oil money.Of course, these corporations do not actively seek genocide, just as IBM did not actively seek the murder of Jews They simply have a morally neutral stance towards it. They clearly see the murder of human beings as irrelevant; the profit margin is all. This tells us something about the nature of corporations – now the dominant cultural and economic institution of our times.Private business is an essential component of a free society because it generates wealth and enables individuals to be independent from the state. The roll-call of companies who chose to do this is long and distinguished: Siemens AG from Germany, Alcatel SA from France, ABB Ltd from Switzerland, Tatneft from Russia and PetroChina.Human Rights Watch states unequivocally: “Oil revenues have been used by the [Sudanese] government to obtain weapons and ammunition that have enabled it to intensify the war.” The money paid by multinationals is not the cause of these programmes of mass slaughter, but it is an essential ingredient.