The shamrock should be "ditched" as a national symbol in favour of a logo more representative of a dynamic, modern country, a leading image consultant told the Marketing Society yesterday. Mr Brian Boylan, chairman of Wolff Olins, a Londonbased company which has designed symbols for AIB, Irish Life and Kerry Group, said that similarly to Britain's Union Jack, Ireland's shamrock stood for a country "more of the past than of the future". He said that Ireland's dramatic changes in the past ten years had seen its vibrant culture impact on the national economy. "The issue for me is you need to develop an idea of the new Ireland which embraces where it's going as opposed to where it's coming from.

"For me the shamrock is moving forward, looking backwards. It really does not have a dynamic which means that we are going into the future," he said.

His company recently completed a survey of the perceptions of Britain among Fortune 500 companies which concluded that a new "Britain" badge to replace the Union Jack on products and services was required. "We believe that the flag stands for old Britain, the tradition, the heritage.

"What came out of the research was that `Made in UK' did not have any credence in the way that `Made in Germany' did," he said.

Britain's achievements and leading role in such areas as bio-technology were unrecognised, he said, while the image of the country was 20 years out of date, associated with labour relations difficulties.

He also suggested that the "Great" should be dropped from "Great Britain". "If you are great, you do not have to say you are great," he said. He added that the decision by the Minister for Tourism, Dr McDaid, to replace the logo for Bord Failte and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board's joint marketing campaign meant the two boards were now "disastrously apart". "You either drop that (the shamrock) and put an awful lot of energy into projecting the totality of the country or you ditch it," he said.