Mr. Paul Holden:

I an honoured that the Minister has decided to reappoint me to the chairmanship of the board and I welcome this opportunity to explain to the committee something about the Digital Hub Development Agency and how I expect it to develop over the coming years.

The hub has a multi-faceted brief and three main ways in which it contributes to Irish society, namely, the enterprise development aspect, the urban regeneration aspect and the community development aspect. Our role is to create an environment in which an enterprise cluster can develop. A cluster attracts a variety of businesses of different sizes and different stages of development which are engaged in similar activities or complementary activities where, by virtue of their close proximity, they can learn from one another, help one another, buy and sell from one another or share facilities talent, ideas and costs. Our job is to make this interaction as frictionless as possible.

The simple view of what we do is that we are just landlords, albeit extraordinarily flexible landlords on account of providing lease agreements which allow companies to expand easily and shrink when they have to shrink within the hub. Beyond the simple view, we are also facilitators in a whole variety of ways. We provide a world-class technical infrastructure for the companies we host. We provide meeting rooms, as and when they are needed, an on-campus cafe and networking events, educational events and advice clinics. We have a centralised reception and security facilities and all these are things which emerging companies would normally have to look after themselves. It would cost them and distract them from their core business.

Our cluster currently has 95 companies, with 750 employees in total. One of our most important achievements is that roughly half are Irish-owned, the other half being foreign owned, which presents great opportunities for learning from one another, supporting one another, trading among themselves and opening up geographical and sectoral markets in which they can help each other. Clusters of this kind enable things to happen that would not otherwise happen, and faster than they would otherwise happen. We envisage that the concentration of companies will attract to the area, though not necessarily to the hub itself, all sorts of specialist support services such as legal services specialising in intellectual property or in mergers and acquisitions, financial experts who are plugged into sources of finance, graphic designers, web designers, marketing experts, translators and so on.

Continued growth of the cluster ties in with the second aspect of our mission, which is urban regeneration. When it was established, the agency was made custodian of a significant property portfolio, including 19 buildings spread over nine acres. Many of these are listed buildings and are of architectural of historical value but many have been disused for a long period and are in a poor state of repair. Our challenge is to treat them with the respect that such a heritage deserves while repurposing them and converting them into productive use. Without very significant State investment, we have to do this in conjunction with the private sector and the project stalled for a number of years during the recession, when it was difficult to get private developers involved. Things have begun to pick up in that respect. At the end of 2015, we succeeded in securing the conversion of a grain storage facility, which once stored the raw materials for making whisky by the George Roe distillery, into modern offices. In the 1800s, it was the largest distillery in the world and exported some 2 million gallons of whisky per year. The building was a grain store but now it is a brain store - instead of being used for heavy industry it is being used for intellectual activity. In return for the work carried out on the grain store we transferred title to a disused warehouse at the back of our campus, which had been in a very poor state of repair. The developers constructed two blocks of high-quality, modern student accommodation, which are now fully operational and house almost 500 students. This has brought a huge level of economic activity into the area.

We are currently engaged in a process to secure the redevelopment of a large site on the south side of Thomas Street, including a vat house which was formerly part of the Guinness facility. It will be a very significant development that will revitalise a big stretch of Thomas Street that is currently very run down and unattractive. It will bring employment and economic activity into the area and will have a positive impact on tourism, because it is just around the corner from one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country, the Guinness Storehouse. Most important for us, it will significantly increase the amount of office space we have for our clients and allow us to expand the cluster further.

The third part of the digital hub's project is our integration into the local community. It is located in the Liberties, where there is a very strong local community and a tradition of hard work and enterprise. Our vision sees the digital hub as an integral part of that community, just as Roe's distillery was in time gone by and Guinness still is. In partnership with the National College of Art and Design, we have been working with young people in the locality to help them to master digital technologies and become active producers of various things of which they would normally be passive consumers, such as graphic design, fashion design, video production, music production etc. We have been working with local schools to help them derive maximum value from digital technologies and we have run programmes for older people parents and others who have had limited exposure to digital technologies.

We are working with local businesses to help them develop their web presence and realise the potential of online trading. Together, these three aspects of the Digital Hub's project mean that the hub makes a contribution at many levels, not only economic but also social and cultural. It is my hope that this will continue in the years ahead.

If any members wish to visit the Digital Hub to see what we are doing, they would be very welcome. I am happy to answer any questions they may have.