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Ireland's international reputation is dropping, says survey

Our ranking has slipped by another three places in a survey of 42,000 people in several countries.

IRELAND’S REPUTATION AMONG an international public has slipped significantly since last year, according to a new survey of G8 nations.

Our country is now ranked 17th out of 53 states – down three places since the last survey in 2010. This continues a decline since the first time the research was carried out in 2009, when Ireland came 11th.

The figures also show a dramatic decline in Irish people’s view of their own country – with nationals rating Ireland 31st, a drop of 12 places since last year.

According to researchers at Corporate Reputations and the Reputation Institute, Ireland’s international reputation is currently having a marked negative effect on the economy. Spokesperson Niamh Boyle said:

If we can improve our reputation, we will see a direct rise in the numbers willing to support us by investing in us, visiting us, buying from us, living here and working here. Our data show us that if Ireland’s reputation improves by 10 per cent, moving from a current score of 63.6 to a score of 70,  tourism and FDI [foreign direct investment] revenues alone would increase by $570 million [€420 million].

During the study 42,000 people across the G8 group of nations – Canada, Germany, Italy, UK, Japan, France, the US and Russia – were asked to rate the standing of each of 53 countries on a number of key attributes. Canada came first, followed by Sweden and Australia, with Iraq at the bottom of the table in 53rd place.

The most important factor in determining reputation was found to be a “friendly and welcoming” population, along with “offering a safe environment to visitors and residents” and “contributing to the global economy”.

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22 Comments
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    Mute Eamon Harbison
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    Aug 11th 2011, 10:37 PM

    Seems to me that Amazon has no one to blame but itself if its data center lost power…. They should have had ample UPS to bridge the utility power loss and the time their N+1 generators kick in. Also, they should have diesel tanks onsite to store at least 72hours worth to run the center on full load, and a local supplier on contract to re-fill the tanks after 24 hours. If Amazon do not have any these redundancy measures in place, I would be very surprised… If they do and they still had power loss that affected their customers services, then they need to look internally for where to point the finger of blame!

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    Mute Christopher Duffin
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    Aug 12th 2011, 9:47 AM

    Not to mention their own software hampering restoration of the downed instances and a complete lack of help from their support in trying to restore things. This has been a joke from the beginning.

    I also cannot understand why they only had power from one sub station supplying the DC. Any data centre I’ve been involved with has had power coming from at least 2 sub stations to avoid these issues.

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    Mute John Jacob
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    Aug 11th 2011, 11:15 PM

    who gives a crap really ?!?!

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    Mute Darren O'Brien
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    Aug 12th 2011, 2:42 AM

    I give a crap. Our company had a good chunk of our infrastructure down
    for 2 days because of this. Im an Irish system administrator working in Spain and this was embarrassing to say the least. We chose Amazon for its reliability and really cutting edge cloud services. The fact that its in Ireland was a bonus and made me proud that one of the best cloud facilities in Europe, if not the world, is in my home country. But we’re going to think hard about continuing with Amazon as I’m sure many others will. It’s a pity but when your company’s existence depends on servers staying on, and even minutes of downtime cost thousands in revenue and incalculable loss of reputation, you’ve got to go where you’ll be sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

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    Mute Damian Keane
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    Aug 12th 2011, 12:30 AM

    People who think that Ireland could make some sorely needed money by being a reliable cloud computing bridgehead for Europe.

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    Mute fitszpatrick
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    Aug 12th 2011, 3:47 AM

    Loss of power is a serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of children on the brink of death by starvation with no back up systems. This is going to have a detrimental effect on their profitability.

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    Mute Jane Bresnan
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    Aug 12th 2011, 8:04 AM

    Maybe there was a lack of surge protection? 48 hours is a long time for a data center to be down. There must have been equipment damage. All data centers will have bought at least two independant feeds from the esb as well, were the esb supplying both from the same substation?

    It is very embarrassing for this to happen. Ireland has been trying to market itself as an ideal data center location because of the lack of extreme weather conditions, distance from earthquake zones and political stability. Top class electrical infrastructure is part of that marketing speil.

    We do not want to lose the investment and employment brought by these corporates.

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