David McWilliams: Superquinn saga sums up our economic tale of woe

IF anything sums up what went wrong with Ireland, it is the saga of Superquinn. On the positive side, if anything shows how we can get out of this mess, it is also the receivership of one of Ireland's best-known brands. Before looking at the receivership and the implications for the rest of the country, let's consider for a moment Superquinn.

In 2001, Feargal Quinn, a man I had never met, asked me to speak at a conference he was hosting. Now it wasn't any old conference, it was a gathering of Europe's top retailers who operate under an umbrella group called EuroCommerce. This organisation represents retail brands and over 100 commercial federations in 27 European countries. These were people who knew their businesses and Feargal Quinn was the president of this organisation.

He was courteous to a fault, which you would expect from the man. But more interesting was the fact that he seemed to know everyone in the business and he understood the business backwards. Here was a retailer to his toes.

As is often the case at conferences, if you bother to listen, you will learn more from the participants than they ever learn from you, the speaker.

The people whom Quinn had assembled in the RDS that day in 2001 knew more about European economics, trends and what was actually happening on the ground than any learned economist. They spoke about interest rates, exchange rates, producer prices, trends in global food manufacturing, sourcing products in exotic locations, the prices of freight from and to China, what was selling in Shanghai and why there was going to be a commodity-price boom in the years ahead.

But they didn't only know the macroeconomic patterns; they also understood what was going on inside the heads of their consumers.

They knew what was happening to family budgets, they knew what was happening to savings and, more significantly, they understood their customers.

And Feargal Quinn was the guy they all looked up to.

That afternoon, one boss of a huge Dutch retailer told me that Quinn was simply the "best in the business", that he was always ahead of the game, always knew what his customer wanted and where the customer was going next.

In the 1970s, when he was building the business, Quinn visited the US to see how suburban trends in the States were changing the way people were shopping. But it was more than shopping -- he was studying the way we were living and the way our suburban lifestyle was changing everything about us.

The English Language | Online Education

Why is it that Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese students of English can read English texts quite easily, the more highbrow the better, but have problems when it comes to talking about simple everyday subjects whereas German, Dutch and Scandinavian students learn to talk relatively easily but have problems understanding difficult written texts? The answer lies in the history of the English language which, by the way, is not a very long one, in fact English is the youngest language there is and the only one of which a date of birth is known or, more precisely, the date before which it didn’t exist.

Let’s go back to the time when Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes, crossed the North Sea from what is now Denmark and northern Germany in the 5th century AD, the Celtic speaking previous inhabitants of the British Isles were pushed into Wales, Cornwall and Scotland, one group migrated to the Brittany coast of France. Celtic words survived mainly in place and river names (Devon, Kent, Severn, Avon, Thames). The Germanic tribes traded with and fought with the Latin-speaking Roman Empire which led to the inclusion of Latin words (camp, fork, kitchen, street, table).; the introduction of Christianity also brought many Latin (and some Greek) words.

In the 8th and 9th century Vikings from Scandinavia conquered and colonised England adding many Norse words (sky, egg, window, husband, anger) to the language but they’re also responsible for a grammatical simplification including the loss of grammatical gender and case endings of nouns (oh, had the Vikings only conquered Germany, too, the German grammar wouldn’t be so difficult to learn!) The language is called Old English, the epic Beowulf by an unknown poet is the most famous surviving piece of literature of this time. It’s very difficult to understand, I had to do a course of Old English at uni and passed the written test only because I cheated unscrupulously by copying my neighbour’s answers.

The time of Old English ended with the Norman conquest in 1066 when Norman-French came to England, for a long time both languages co-existed. The English farmers bred animals – ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine – every German can understand these words at once because in German they’re nearly identical; the Norman-French conquerors, the upper class, were interested only in eating the animals, that is the reason why the words for meat are derived from French (beef, veal, mutton, pork, venison).

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