Mr. Sean O'Sullivan:

I thank the Chairman and members for inviting us to appear before them, an invitation we were very happy to accept. I praise the Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for its great work in producing the report entitled, A review of the ICT skills demand in Ireland.

Let me introduce the members of the delegation. Mr. Paul Sweetman is a director of ICT Ireland which represents 75% of the 90,000 and more tech workers employed in such companies in Ireland.

Next is Mr. Joe Cunningham, chairman of the technology company Ammeon and, incidentally, the man we can either curse or praise as the creator of the text message. If anyone has ever sent a text message, he is the guy responsible. Of course, it was an Irish company that pioneered this throughout the world. Finally, there is Mr. Colin Donnery from FRS Recruitment, the former chairman of the National Recruitment Federation.

As committee members know, among the roles of government leadership is to provide oversight and direction for the Civil Service, to add perspective and priorities and to separate the forest from the trees. This leadership drives the direction in which Ireland moves. We appreciate the committee's invitation as it indicates the strength of its commitment to the technology sector and its contribution to the growth of Ireland's economy. We have an historic opportunity on our hands in the tech industry today. The committee will have a copy of the leaflet from Open Ireland outlining the vision behind the technology visa and, in addition, we have circulated in advance a white paper which forms the basis for the comments I will be making here. The paper, which was authored by Mr. Gareth Whelan, who is part of the Open Ireland team, has been drawn from the input of hundreds in the industry, in government and in academia.

As a personal introduction, I came to Ireland about seven years ago to set up a business. I came here because of the well-deserved reputation Ireland has as a technology hotbed. I have adopted Ireland as my home and helped grow some businesses here. In fact, I have a venture capital firm, SOSventures, which has backed a number of companies. I started a couple of companies here that now employ over 100 workers in the high-tech sector alone. When I came here, I brought with me foreign direct investment which so far totals well over €10 million, to Irish businesses. Better still, the companies I have backed here attract revenues from all over the world to the tune of many millions of euro every year, which is helping to expand our economy. Every year, we support payrolls that help improve the economy and provide an income for more than 100 families, all of whom are taxpayers. These are good, high-quality jobs that provide indirect additional jobs to people throughout Ireland.

I am not unusual and there is nothing unusual about the story I am telling. There are 5,400 companies in the ICT sector that also bring investment into Ireland, generate jobs and generate a vibrant economy and inward income to the Irish high-tech sector. Yet there is a problem. Like most Irish technology companies, we have been unable to grow as fast as we would like. We have been unable to fulfil the orders we have received. We have been unable to employ as many as we could because there is a difficulty in hiring the skilled workers we need. This is not because there are no skilled workers here - there are many - but because the growth in these tech positions is too fast for colleges in Ireland to supply the workforce that can fit the needs of the jobs. These jobs are opening at a faster pace than can be filled with our native population.

As a report from IBEC last year indicated, because of the talent shortfall, the majority of companies end up facing the decision to outsource jobs to other countries or to regretfully pass on opportunities to expand their businesses inside Ireland. To bring in talent from outside the EU has, to date, been far too difficult because of structural limitations and how the Departments of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and Justice and Equality have applied policy and regulations to slow the hiring of critical IT workers. The situation has become so intense that companies are recruiting from other companies, driving up wages unsustainably and damaging the industry. Mr. John Mullins from Bord Gáis explained this best when he said Irish companies are cannibalising each other.

Despite the fantastic opportunity we have and the leadership Ireland has in technology, our success has put us on the cusp of a decision. Do we want the ICT industry to grow or to die? The answer to date from the Government and leadership has been resoundingly that we want it to grow. Now we need to put the policies in place to make this happen.

The plans in this committee's report highlight a number of key actions and conclusions to which I would like to respond. According to the plan, Ireland needs to double the number of graduates with key ICT skills. I agree completely, as does everyone in the industry. However, Ireland also needs to raise the bar on the quality of these graduates. We are in the creativity business, the invention business. This is not a factory worker business in which people come in and work nine-to-five on a computer screen. We need super-smart, flexible geniuses. It is hard to get these people. They are like gold dust and, when they graduate from high school, they are choosing to apply to other fields such as medicine or law rather than technology.

Another point in the report is that the demand that exists for ICT skills is not solely for very experienced software developers but spans a whole spectrum of the industry. That is very true. Competent software developers are the lifeblood of the software development industry. Too much of the time, we think of high-level management positions only. While I accept we miss senior resources in certain areas such as product management, growth hacking and business intelligence, in addition, UX designers, Java developers and entry level positions are also in very scarce supply.

The report also mentioned that many of those who choose to study technology at third level are dropping out before the start of the second year. This is probably due to structural educational difficulties in Ireland that have been identified by this report. We have people who have not programmed before going to college and majoring in programming. It is equivalent to a person being accepted to play hurling at county level before ever having played at club level, which is preposterous.

This report signals CoderDojo as one of the creative uses of ICT in schools. It quotes Mr. James Whelton, who works closely with me at SOSventures, as saying that many teachers have little experience in web design or coding, which means that it is not taught efficiently and students have a bad experience. This needs to be recognised. We cannot operate under the fallacy that one can teach what one cannot understand. Could some secondary teachers teach coding? Of course they could. However, it is impossible for many of them to keep up with the rapidly changing pace of coding. New approaches such as CoderDojo are happening in the Irish economy, which is very exciting. The speed at which the industry moves is rapid. This report says that 150 children are learning with CoderDojo every weekend throughout Ireland. Since that was written, this has grown to more than 4,000.

The good news here is that change can happen rapidly, much faster than the incremental change we think can happen. It is sometimes easier to have a revolution than evolution. That is our challenge in Open Ireland. We are bringing to the attention of the industry and the Government that we can do more than just be competitive. We can excel. We can lead the world and become the go-to place for starting and developing high-tech businesses - the Silicon Valley of Europe. What needs to develop, we believe, is an atmosphere of openness in which the Government goes on the offensive and Ireland's national policy of recruiting and welcoming talent, including talent in engineering, puts Ireland at a distinct advantage when compared to anywhere else in the world. We need to change our mindset. We do not want to be worst country in the world at allowing in technical talent. We want to be the country that welcomes technical talent like no other. Céad míle fáilte.

The truth is the world is moving very fast beyond our little country's borders. We have a current leadership position of sorts in technology and we can and should build on this. We have advantages that few other countries have in terms of our proficiency at English, our EU membership, our culture and our workforce. However, other truths are that power tends to concentrate in a few geographic hot spots. Without enough of a critical mass and without enough people being aware of what a superstar Ireland is and could be, we will let this historic opportunity slip away from us.

Open Ireland and a group of technology companies, small and large, met the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation in the past few weeks to discuss and get feedback on the initiatives the Government is planning to unveil. I am very encouraged that the Government looks to be moving aggressively in rolling out a plan that will be in effect within one to two months.

We have been informed that more than one-half of the existing rules are being scrapped and that processes are being revamped to be automated and speeded by factors. We have some specific recommendations about which we can answer the committee's questions. I thank the committee for inviting us to appear before it today.