Marc Coleman

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Marc Coleman is the Head of International Business Development for IBEC, a role newly created by Ireland's largest business representative body to meet the challenges posed to Irish business by the advent of Brexit and a more complex international trading environment. He is known for publications that advocate strengthening Ireland's commercial and economic penetration of Asia and mainland Europe; speaking ability, and using foreign languages in presentations. Earlier, as IBEC Director of Financial Services Ireland (FSI), Coleman oversaw a highly successful growth in the sector's influence at home and abroad. As the first Secretariat to the government's International Financial Services 2020, he helped establish the sector's engagement with the government following a decade-long crisis in financial services. Using his media experience improved the industry's standing with the public. Before this Coleman wrote four books on Ireland's economy, including two bestsellers and two detailed books on Ireland's international economic relations.

Previously he was a broadcaster with Ireland's private sector national broadcaster Newstalk 106 FM, a leading economic columnist with the Sunday Independent, and an Economics Editor of the Irish Times. He has also worked as an Economist with the European Central Bank in Frankfurt and the Irish Department of Finance in Dublin.

Early life[]

Coleman was born as a child in Erlangen, Bavaria before returning to Ireland in the mid-1970s. He was a member of Fine Gael in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Coleman studied at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin where he lived until 1997 then returned to Germany to work at the European Central Bank. He also took the prestigious Advanced Studies Programme at the Kiel Institute of World Economics.

Career[]

Coleman worked in Carr Communications before joining the Department of Foreign Affairs as a diplomat at the Anglo Irish desk and then the Department of Finance. He worked on economic analysis, monitoring Ireland's international competitiveness and research related to the preparation for EMU. In 1997 Coleman joined the European Monetary Institute which became European Central Bank in 1998. After working on the 1998 Convergence report – which assessed the fitness of Euro candidate countries for membership - Coleman worked in the International economy desk during the 1998 Asia crisis before moving to the Monetary Policy Division, where he worked on the aggregation, reporting, and analysis of euro area monetary policy statistics. He helped to automate the ECB's internal economic reporting systems. As the Irish desk economist for the ECB in 2003, Coleman organized an ECB delegation to the Central Bank of Ireland to express concern about rising property prices.

In 2004 he was awarded a scholarship to do an MBA at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business UCD and became The Irish Times Economics Editor in 2005.^[1] He joined Newstalk in September 2007 as its Economics Editor and was given his own show in 2009. The show "The Marc Coleman Show" broadcast each Sunday, then a late evening show called "Coleman at Large". Coleman also wrote for Ireland's most extensive Sunday paper, the Sunday Independent, and regularly spoke at public events in Ireland and internationally.

In 2011 he stood for the Seanad for a University of Dublin seat, coming fifth in a field of twenty candidates in a three-seat contest ^[2]

In early 2015 Coleman joined the Irish business representative body IBEC as Director of Financial Services Ireland (FSI). He oversaw a highly successful commercial growth of the unit and drove a significant improvement in the international financial services industry's profile with the government and the public. In April 2015, he was appointed as Secretary to the International Financial Services 2020 process, a dialogue between the international financial services industry and government which aimed at growing employment in the industry by 10,000 between 2015 and 2020. In early 2018 FSI published a statistical report that showed employment in the industry had already reached 40,000 by 2015. Ireland is now on track to achieve 50,000 employed in the sector by 2020. During 2016 and 2017, he strongly advocated for greater regionalization of Ireland's international financial services. That year Coleman also initiated international work to prepare for the financial services industry's response to Brexit with high-level networking between key representative bodies in the EU. In November 2016, at the Euro Finance Week in Frankfurt, he warned against British financial services' isolation . In October 2017, he co-organized the Financial Services Centre summit 2017 in Dublin Castle with over 400 registered guests and 70 speakers at which both the current EU financial services Commissioner Waldis Dombrovskis and former Commissioner Lord Jonathan Hill set out differing visions for Europe's financial service environment.

In response to the growing challenges of Brexit and a more complicated international trading environment for Ireland's open economy, IBEC created the new role of “Head of International Business Development,” to which Coleman was appointed. Coleman organizes, speaks at, and initiates events to promote the diversification of Ireland's global commercial footprint and organizes collaboration with vital international associations to promote international commercial opportunities for IBEC members.

Economics Editor, Columnist, and Author[]

Between 2005 and 2007, Coleman produced several articles warning of Ireland's coming economic crash.^[3]

He incorporated these warnings in a controversially titled book The Best is Yet to Come, which repeated warnings about a possible crash (chapters 3,4, and 5) but stressed a positive view of Ireland's capacity to recover by 2020. The book forecast that strong growth in Ireland's population would continue through the crisis. Between 2006 and 2013, Ireland's population rose from 4.2 to 4.6 million (Census 2011, CSO). Coleman maintains this will provide a basis for restored prosperity by 2020.

Late in 2009, Coleman published the book Back from the Brink. Coleman prescribed policies that he argued would accelerate economic recovery in Ireland and the world, such as overhauling the financial regulatory system that existed before the boom, reforming Ireland's political system, and shifting growth from construction and property.

Books[]

Coleman's first book, “The Best is Yet To Come” (2007), was heavily criticized due to its positive title before Ireland's imminent economic crisis. Coleman has responded to this criticism by arguing that the book's optimism is related to 2020 and beyond. His previous Irish Times articles and the book's opening chapters contained clear warnings of an imminent crisis beforehand. He also maintains that books central tenet – that after a crisis the Irish economy would return to strong economic and population growth – has been fully vindicated and says that Ireland's current housing crisis proves how the book's call on government to plan house building for a growing population was accurate. The book was praised by Irish civil servant and statesman TK Whitaker and historian Professor Joe Lee. In 2009 Coleman's second book, entitled Back from the Brink was published. It opened by strongly criticizing what Coleman believed was excessive and destructive negativity on Ireland's future economic prospects. The book contained a wide-ranging analysis of Ireland's crisis as well as proposals for recovery. The book was positively reviewed by a broad range of commentators and experts, including Professor Don Thornhill, Leo Varadkar T.D., and prominent economist Constantin Gurdiev. In 2013 Coleman co-authored Irland und Deutschland Partnern in Europaischem Aufschwung (Ireland and Germany Partners in European Recovery), and in 2014 he co-authored Unlocking Ireland’s trade potential with Asia. Both books stressed Ireland's need to preserve its commitment to the global trading environment to ensure recovery and diversify its economy and commercial linkages globally.

Personal life[]

Coleman is married with one child and speaks Irish at home with his family. He is a strong advocate of bilingual immersion to promote both the Irish language and foreign language skills. He has written and presented in German, Italian, and Mandarin. Coleman is a designated champion of foreign languages in business as established by the Department of Education's Foreign Languages Advisory Group.

References[]

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External links[]

• Official Website

Articles by Marc Coleman[]

• 2005 article in the Sunday Business Post
• Article in Studies on "God and the European Constitution"
• Multi-generational mortgages