Green image can help us earn our way out of crisis

All right, what can we do? Getting the country out of this mire means replacing a busted economic model with one that works. We need, putting it bluntly, to make some cash. How?

No point in deciding to suddenly get into satellite launching or ocean-floor mining. We've got to play to our strengths, see what we've got going for us and go with that. And near the top of any list of Ireland's advantages has to be our relatively clean environment. The fact that we've had so little industrialisation in the past, plus the fact that the country gets thoroughly washed down about every third day, makes it possibly the least polluted state in the developed world. We have advantages that other supposedly clean countries just can't match.

Switzerland for example is too close for comfort to industrialised areas of France, Germany and Italy. Go up an Alp and you can count the nuclear power stations.

But the real advantage is not just that Ireland actually is relatively clean, but that it is perceived to be. The country is pictured as largely unspoiled, even undeveloped, and that image is so embedded that even the recent efforts have not greatly marred it. We should be trading on this far more than we do. Too much of our agricultural produce is undistinguished quota-meeting stuff, when we are capable of growing the unusually good. Irish apples for example – available now! – are fantastic. It breaks my heart that supermarkets are full of apples imported from France or, God help us, Brazil when native ones have so much more taste. OK, the factory-farmed ones look better. They look like the cartoon apples on apple packaging. Mass-produced fruit is its own packaging – and it's beginning to taste like it. Ireland should build a national brand of organic, traditional, GM-free food, at the high price rather than the high volume end of the market. But agriculture is nothing like sufficient to create all the jobs and wealth we'll need. The service industries have proved themselves to be unreliable. To make real money you have to make real things. Ireland needs a lot more manufacturing.

Am I crazy? Nobody ‘makes things’ anymore. Well, nobody except the Chinese and we can't compete with their enormous, suspiciously prison-like factories. Admittedly, we can't compete at the low cost, high volume end. But that is just one specialisation. Throughout the world, countries are making lots of money by manufacturing the things they are famous for, like cars from Germany or phones from Finland. We need our manufacturing niche.

But wait, is not manufacturing in direct conflict with the image of a clean environment? No – not if we do it right. We've already made a good start, most of the manufacturing we have is in the squeaky-clean areas of medical devices and microprocessors, but we can capitalise on this a lot more. There will be ever-increasing demand for clean, sustainable technologies; new low-pollution equipment for example, the machinery needed to generate renewable energy.

Many countries can offer Green technology of course, and many can even make it in sustainable ways. But can they make it in an environment that is unsullied by previous centuries of dirty industry? No – but we can. We can make the cleanest machines.