Mr. Paddy Cosgrave:

I thank the Chairman and the committee for inviting me here today - it is humbling for a number of reasons which I will outline over the next 30 or 40 minutes. I now employ close to 50 people. We hire, for the most part, highly educated and highly skilled people, some of whom are very recent graduates from this country and the rest are from elsewhere. Through the Dublin Web Summit in October 2012, attended by more than 4,200 people the majority of whom came from abroad, I have had the privilege of meeting and interacting with many of the CEOs of the fastest-growing technology companies in Europe and further afield. I have also worked closely with many of the most active investors in the technology sector, which is only one sector in a much broader economy.

I have thought long and hard about job creation and everything I have learned in recent years. I contrast that experience in business with everything I learned studying economics not far from here, in Trinity College. In the time between completing my studies in economics and today, I have had the privilege of meeting and talking with people who define everything that is good about the country - incredible entrepreneurs, incisive public servants, committed politicians, concerned academics and citizens.

One of those groups stands out in its understanding of how to create a job at a very basic level, that is, business people, entrepreneurs, companies. I know how to create a job. I know the type of people I want. I know how to hire and I know how to train someone into a job, or on the job, but when it comes to creating tens of thousands of jobs, in fact, hundreds of thousands of jobs, not only in Ireland but across Europe, I am not sure my experience in business has taught me anything. The challenges are, perhaps, distinct.

In economics, I learned about macro-level challenges. In business, I have learned about incredibly local-level challenges, that is, the challenges distinct to my sector and, more specifically, to my company. No business person ultimately needs to know how GDP is calculated, why it is used as a measure of economic well-being or why it is relevant. No business person needs to know how Ireland calculates its unemployment statistics or measures of productivity and how the calculation of these measures may diverge from, say, the United States, and the academic debates within economics that rage about these calculations and miscalculations. These facts should not take away from the brilliance of so many Irish business people in creating jobs at a company level, but that is distinct from an economy-wide level.

In truth, I am slightly nervous sitting here today because throughout history it has been business people, confident of the applicability of their anecdotal experience, who have influenced politicians with their ideas, rightly or wrongly, naively or otherwise. Business people like me have funded economic think-tanks and chairs in departments of economics, in this country and elsewhere, to further their ideas, which, in many cases, as a consequence of either their own naivety or otherwise, have proved largely ruinous for most people and beneficial for some.

I do not want to diverge too much from the purpose of this meeting and committee but I want to underline the fact that this has been a consistent feature of most western societies for centuries and something politicians have had to constantly battle with. There is nothing new in what I am saying. Adam Smith wrote openly of this tendency nearly 250 years ago when he published The Wealth of Nationsin 1776. He warned of "the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers", by which he meant their ideas which, he felt, would naturally try to thwart the aspirations of politicians by turning civil government into civil government instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor. There are countless other relevant examples but I will not dwell on them. I am not saying no business person could have a good economic idea, but I am saying that the committee should take what I say with a pinch of salt for historic reasons and because I know a great deal about creating one job, or, at least, a few, but almost nothing about creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in Ireland or millions across Europe.

However, I will say this. The achievements of our education system over the past number of decades are revolutionary. In the space of a few decades, we have gone from the most uneducated country in western Europe to the most educated. The statistics are stark. For example, 19% of the Irish aged 45 to 64 in 2011 attained only a primary school level of education and in the rest of the EU 15, which excludes the United Kingdom but includes the rest of western Europe, the corresponding figure was 1%, that is, which attained only a primary level education. Ireland is now ranked joint first in the European Union for third level attainment among those aged 25 to 34, according to the latest survey from the Central Statistics Office. Germany, for instance, is actually far below.

It is with this reverence that we now have for education in this country that I will make my only suggestion at this point, and then I look forward to further discussion. Exchequer or European funding for any policy should be allocated on the basis of evidence. In the absence of any evidence, positive or negative, the policy should be rigorously tested, ideally, initially at a very small level. When it comes to the provision of health care, doctors implement solutions on the basis of evidence. What matters is a proven outcome. Quack doctors, shamans and soothsayers rely on solutions that may sound good; real doctors rely on solutions that are based on evidence. State funding in this country is not always allocated on the basis of evidence; in others, it is. In this instance, my only suggestion is that it should be.