The last word

Power & Responsiblity - Tina Roche, Chief Executive, Business in the Community Ireland, speaks to EM about Corporate Social Responsibility and how ESB is getting involved.

Tina Roche has been involved in the community and voluntary sector in one way and another for almost her entire career so it was no surprise when she became the founding Chief Executive of Business in the Community Ireland in 2000. She remembers her engagement with voluntary work beginning when she was a teenager in Dublin's inner city.

"My father was heavily involved in the James's Street Credit Union for years and all of us in the family were expected to do our bit for it and to be good neighbours generally," she recalls. "I was working behind the counter there when I was 16 years of age and I've been involved in community and voluntary work ever since."

While working as Financial Controller in The Sunday Tribune during the 1980s, she maintained her involvement both through the newspaper and outside of it. "I helped organise the first Simon Community 10k run while at the Tribune," she says. "I was involved in 1984 in setting up the first AIDS helpline in Ireland and after that I became very active in Amnesty International."

After leaving The Sunday Tribune in the 1990s she went to work for the National Gallery of Ireland. "I was involved in fundraising for the new Millennium Wing of the gallery. Both the Tribune and the National Gallery were great places to work. I was very lucky to work with fantastic people like Vincent Browne, Gene Kerrigan, Pat Brennan, Fintan O'Toole, Gerald Barry, Paul Tansey and Mairin de Burca. They were great times."

She had been considering a full time career with Amnesty when Business in the Community (BITC) came knocking on her door. "I was told about an advertisement. for a job as Chief Executive of this new organisation and advised to go for it," she explains. "The whole concept of Business in the Community arose out of the 1997 partnership agreement when the community and voluntary pillar was involved properly in the talks for the first time. As a result of that agreement, it was decided to establish an organisation dedicated to promoting corporate social responsibility in Ireland and I became its first Chief Executive."

Today, BITC has become a unique movement of companies across Ireland committed to responsible business practices. "Our purpose is to inspire, engage, support and challenge companies to continually improve the impact they have on society, specifically in the community, environment, marketplace and workplace," says Roche.

BITC's mission is to harness the power of Irish business to maximise its positive impact on all its stakeholders. It is a non-profit organisation specialising in advice and guidance to leading companies on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate community involvement. BITCI is also the national partner in Ireland for CSR Europe, the co-ordinating body on corporate responsibility at a European level.

A business driven network, with major social initiatives, BITCI's membership is drawn from Ireland's most progressive companies including ESB, Intel Ireland, Johnson & Johnson, IBM and many other leading private and public sector organisations. BITCI has the unique expertise to train and develop capacity on corporate responsibility within organisations; to improve their companies' reputation, competitiveness and profitability through communicating their social, environmental and community management impacts.

"We look at corporate social responsibility and a company's impacts in a very holistic way," she adds. "It's not the just social issues; it's the environment, the workplace, the community and the marketplace. There is an interconnection between all of these things. Corporate social responsibility is about an openness, transparency and governance. Back in 2000 we were looking at creating a new framework for the management and measurement of the non-financial performance of companies and a bit achievement of BITC is the fact that the framework is now there."

The work on building this framework began back in 2000. "We started by talking to companies about what their needs were and we also learned a lot from the Business in the Community organisations in Northern Ireland and the UK," she notes. "We wanted to look at how organisations develop their values and cultures and how this impacts on the way they day business. ESB was one of our founding members and the organisation has

“ESB has for a long time considered social and environmental performance to be at least as important as financial performance...”

always been committed to integrating corporate social responsibility into its very fabric."

She believes ESB has made an important contribution to CSR in Ireland. "I remember how they brought health and safety into everything they did and established a health and safety culture throughout the whole organisation. This has acted as an example to other organisations throughout the country. Also, ESB has for a long time considered social and environmental performance to be at least as important as financial performance."

Responsible business practices are also important. "We are trying to drive corporate responsibility and sustainable business practices," she points out. "And we are trying to support companies in measuring that. It's easy to measure the bottom line but it's much harder to measure non-financial performance. ESB was the first company in Ireland to do it when they issued their full spectrum CSR report in 2004 and they have been a pathfinder organisation for others to follow ever since."

She is passionate about the importance of CSR to today's businesses and to the Irish economy generally. "What we try to do is promote best practice," she explains. "We take basic compliance as the floor and we try to get companies to aspire to be the best. Ireland's reputation is on its knees at the moment and we have to rebuild that reputation by doing things better than they were done before. I see CSR as a framework for this. We are working on the development of a recognised standard for corporate responsibility at the moment. This could see Ireland becoming a recognised leader in sustainable and responsible business practices and thus become a very attractive place to do business again. I am looking forward to the next 10 years – we have a lot to be optimistic about if we can rebuild the trust of the people in the business community."

EM