For a book called "A Just Society", edited by John Scally and published in 2003, I contributed this chapter:

One of the problems that people in business in Ireland face is the general public attitude to their activities. This attitude, however well-intentioned, is not supportive of ethical behaviour in business.

Let me approach this in a somewhat roundabout way. If I talk about the history of my company, I am telling the story of a tiny enterprise that began over 40 years ago in Dundalk with a mere handful of colleagues and which has now grown to a point where our team numbers nearly 6,000 at 19 locations around the country. It's a story of the kind we would all like to see more of, so it's appropriate to ask: what is the one essential ingredient of this progress?

A novel approach?

An entrepreneurial spirit?

A dedication to customer service?

If I propose any of those factors to an Irish audience, I will have many heads nodding in agreement. But, though all have been critical to Superquinn's progress, none of these is the one that is essential to any successful business.

That essential factor is… profit.

And that word is enough to set the lips curling in disdain. All of a sudden, the "good guy" has introduced a disreputable concept that, to very many people in Ireland, is regarded as inherently bad.

Profit is seen, at best, as a necessary evil. When John Scally invited me to write this article, one of the things he asked me to discuss was "profit versus the public good".

Unlike in other cultures, it is not in Ireland part of our conventional wisdom to regard profit as a necessary good. We are slow to see it as the one essential element in making an economy grow, essential because only from profit can come the resources to provide the investment that will inevitably be needed to fund growth.

To show how deeply this is ingrained in the Irish psyche, let us look no further than the statutes establishing our commercial semi-state bodies. Invariably in such legislation you will find a clause that imposes on the body the obligation "to break even, taking one year with another". The implication is that breaking even is enough to ensure continued success, and that the correct posture for a State company is to be not for profit.

That implication is not only wrong, it is dangerously wrong. Many of the problems that our commercial semi-state bodies have run into in recent years have been due precisely because they have not been able to generate the resources they needed for investment - in other words, because they were not making enough profit to fund their growth.

To survive, let alone to grow, every business needs a constant flow of new investment. Profit, far from being an undesirable aspect of business activity, is as desirable and necessary as any other business cost. Profit, properly regarded, is a cost of doing business in the future.

Why does this attitude to profit matter? And why is it, as I claimed at the beginning, unsupportive of ethical behaviour by people in business.

It matters because of what it implies. If profit is in itself undesirable, those who engage in the business of making a profit are outside the pale from the start. The attitude encourages people to believe that by getting involved in business at all, they have crossed some kind of ethical divide. And that once they have crossed that divide, the only questions that arise after that are ones of degree.

So if we wish to raise the ethical standards in Irish business, the first thing we need to do is redraw our moral map. The ethical issues arising from profit are not due to its existence, but to its misuse.

Profits can be excessive.

Profits can be unfair, they can be exploitative.

We need both legal and moral restraints against such activities. But we don't help to control or discourage them by starting from the viewpoint that all profit is inherently bad, like greed. Greed is inherently bad, but all profit is not greed.

How, then, do we control excessive or unfair profits? In my view, the most effective way is through competition. Competition is what ensures a moral balance between buyer and seller.

In the absence of competition, the only choice a buyer has is between buying and not buying. But in the real world, the choice of not buying at all is seldom a realistic one. If one provider of goods or services has a monopoly, there is no restraint on the resultant profit - and, incidentally, no incentive at all to behave in the interests of the buyer.

On the other hand, where the buyer has a free choice between genuinely competing suppliers, there is an automatic constraint against excessive profits and an inbuilt incentive to suppliers to grow their business through meeting their customers' needs.

Competition is what keeps people in business honest; competition is what contains their greed. (No wonder they don't like it!)

We would, in my view, make a major leap forward if we moved our ethical goalposts away from "profit is inherently bad" and pitched them in a different position: "competition is inherently good".

The fact that we have been so slow to do this is reflected in the fact that it is only recently we have developed a legal system for regulating competition, and then only under pressure from Europe rather out of any philosophical convictions.

Another aspect of the way we look at things could be seen in the various debates about privatisation that took place over the past decade. A great deal of ideological heat was generated as to the appropriateness of State ownership or private ownership of an enterprise. But very little attention was given to what to my mind was the real issue- and which unlike the ownership question did have a moral dimension - namely, what arrangement will foster the most competition?

A third insight into how we tend to think on this matter was reflected in the debates in the late 1990s that led to the setting up of the regulator's office for telecommunications, which was made necessary by the introduction of competition into that sector. The legislation conceived the regulator as simply a fair arbitrator between whatever competitors entered the market; I, on the other hand, argued that the public good required a regulator whose task would include the active encouragement of competition. I didn't win that argument at the time, but I think events since have proved me right.

However, shifting the goal-posts to make competition our central concern is not the end of the matter. Rather is it a proper positioning for a debate which must be ongoing, and which to be complete needs a moral dimension as well as a purely legal one.

Let me illustrate this by considering the concept of "fair" competition". It goes without saying that fairness in competition is both necessary and desirable. But fairness is not something that can always be considered in a totally self-contained way, or by criteria that can be defined solely in legal terms.

Suppose, to take an example from my own industry, you allow the development of retail outlets so huge that to be viable they have to serve entire regions, and as a consequence make unviable any smaller outlets in towns and villages across the region.

In the narrow sense, such competition is "fair". But in the wider sense of the public good, does it make sense to undermine completely the traditional social geography of our country?

Before you say "no", however, remember that in its essentials this is the same argument that has always been put forward to oppose any kind of development that threatened the viability of an existing business. If we always had said "no" to this, Ireland today would have no supermarkets and be served exclusively by corner shops.

My point here is not to argue that "yes" or "no" is always the right response, but rather that the right response can change with the circumstances of each case - and should be decided, in the final analysis, on the basis of our values and our view as to what kind of a community we wish to create.

We should not look to a legal system to insulate us from this kind of moral debate. Neither should we dismiss the issue as beneath our notice because it may be presented as exclusively a business issue. Though it certainly is a business issue in that profits and losses are involved for some of the players, it is a public issue in that what we decide has wide and long-lasting ramifications for the way in which almost everybody lives their lives.

If embracing competition as a central good does not excuse us from the responsibility of considering the decisions it entails, neither should we be blind to the ethical dilemmas that competition can create as a side-effect. One of the most fundamental choices available to us in life is that of choosing our friends, our acquaintances, or who we do business with. By and large, we tend to choose our friends, acquaintances, or business associates from those with whom we are in broad agreement on things we consider important. At an individual level, we (rightly, in my view) treasure the freedom not to do business with a person or company with which we have a fundamental moral disagreement.

One of the side-effects of a competitive economy is that companies serving the public do not have the same freedom to choose who they do business with. The reason is very simple: if they exercised that freedom, they would usually go out of business very quickly indeed.

This has been a very real issue for me throughout most of my business life. In the nature of things, a business like mine sells thousands of individual goods, sourced from all parts of the world. Ethical issues arise all the time, either with the regime of the country they come from (South Africa, Israel, Chile, Colombia, etc) or with production practices (slave labour, child labour, prices that exploit the original producer, use of chemicals or genetic engineering with unknown potential consequences, disregard for the environment, etc), or even with the nature of the product itself (alcohol, cigarettes, etc).

The list goes on and on. Since going into business I can hardly remember a single month going by without our being asked by somebody, either an individual customer or an organisation, not to sell a particular product for ethical reasons. Very early on I realised that, however much I might sympathise with the particular cause involved, to apply a boycott at our level would be commercially disastrous.

The reality was that, in each case, the customers concerned with any particular issue were always in a minority - sometimes a tiny minority. Most customers were indifferent to the issue, but usually clear in their wish to go on buying the goods concerned.

So the dilemma presented to us was between being "morally blind" in our buying decisions or refusing to sell to the majority of customers goods they wanted to buy - and which if they didn't buy from us they would get from our competitors. Anyone who has done business in a competitive environment will realise that you survive by giving your customers reasons to do business with you, not by giving them reasons to go to your competitors instead.

But, to take this argument to a further level, suppose a smart lobby group attacks this on an industry-wide level, and manages to get all retailers to agree not to stock a particular product? Would this not nullify the competition argument? Yes, but then the ground shifts to the question of how much support the lobby group has. If an overwhelming majority of customers agree with the boycott, well and good. But if even a significant minority of customers want to buy the goods, then I believe they should have the freedom to do so.

I think in ethical terms it comes down to this: the individual freedom to buy or not to buy is one thing; removing that freedom from other people is something quite different. For me, the lesser evil is sometimes selling goods that have a morally doubtful whiff about them.

In this respect, an individual retailer is in quite a different position to that of a government restricting sales for safety or health reasons -I believe government has the right, and indeed the duty, to protect its citizens from known hazards.

This is not, however, to say that players in the distribution chain do not have a role to play in influencing their suppliers. Because of where they are placed in the chain, they are often better positioned than an individual customer to relay the concerns that customers have to the ultimate producers - and in my view, we have a clear duty to do so.

There have been some notable successes in this regard, as well as some unforeseen negative side-effects. For instance, pressure was successfully put on Bangladeshi textile producers to stop employing child labour. Unfortunately, nobody thought to ensure that the children thrown out of work would be looked after - in a country that lacks universal free schooling and where the children's earnings were often critical to their whole family's survival. When we take action of this kind, we surely have an obligation to think all the implications through and take responsibility for the knock-on effects.

In general, though, it may surprise some people to find that I tend to be a little wary of any business scenario that casts companies in the role of "do gooders". In recent years, in pursuit of the public relations objective of establishing an image as a "good corporate citizen", many companies have chosen to make sizeable financial contributions to various community, artistic or charitable causes.

My own experience is that, very often, a company's customers see such generosity as the self-interested activity it usually is. Even more sharply, many customers have often expressed to me the view that they resent "their money" being spent by us in this way. "Give us lower prices and let us spend the savings in whatever way we choose," is a common sentiment.

On the other hand, win-win opportunities do arise for business companies, and I believe we should focus our attention more on them. For instance, while not selling particular products is fraught with the problems I have outlined above, making a positive decision to stock a particular product can often have very beneficial results. From the beginning, my company made a definite policy of offering customers the choice of buying an Irish product, where such was available; we saw that as part of our basic obligation to the community we do business in. Again, choosing to offer our customers "fair trade coffee" is a positive way of addressing the ethical conundrums of the world coffee market.

Because I have chosen to highlight what I see as the neglected area of competition as a central public good, I have left it to now to turn my attention to what is undoubtedly the classic "occasion of sin" in business ethics - conflict of interest.

Most ethical problems in business can be seen as conflicts of interest, and most of them (such as, for example, simple fraud or theft) apply equally in communities anywhere in the world. But the nature and history of our society in Ireland presents us with a number of special issues:

In each of these areas, a common theme recurs: the notion that knowledge is good, and can be our defence against wrong-doing.

So to all those who would wish for higher ethical standards in Irish business, I therefore suggest two words to write on their banner: on one side, competition; on the other, openness.

And be relaxed about profit, okay?