Ms Tracy Keogh:

Manorhamilton is one of the areas where this started for me personally. I was in with Mr. Ronan Hazlette who converted his building into a co-working space for Manorhamilton and called it Manor Hub. Mr. Hazlette works all over the world. He is a fantastic guy and he has such conviction and passion for his community. I wondered how I was going to support this experience. It is so difficult. It is not an easy win. I understand that communities have been doing this for a while because we are a community that has been doing it. People may have heard about the things that do not happen but that is part and parcel of community. Grow Remote has taken the energy from Tullamore to Gorey to Cork to Valentia Island to Arranmore Island and brought it together in a structure where we can get it to others and set out our coherent asks. This ensures we do not turn into a type of social club. On that note, when I was listening back to the committees, I heard one man speak about the importance of social enterprise in communities. We strengthen groups by training them up and building competent communities. As communities, we need the help of the committee around structuring our thoughts and opinions and the actions that we want to take. We have received great support from Social Entrepreneurs Ireland. Without Mr. John Evoy being at the other end of a telephone call for me, I would have been fairly stuck.

Deputy Kenny also asked about chapters. We went to ChangeX and we set out what ever the community needs to do. We built the guide to finding remote work so that people know where to find it. The Deputy is right that 64% of people say they do not work remotely because they do not know where to find that work. These jobs are not listed on the same sites as other jobs. That was a core part of what we did. We then gathered all of those tools together and brought them to ChangeX. Communities that want to do this literally need only take five steps to set up a chapter. The set-up process is pretty structured. ChangeX is a tremendous organisation to enable this. I am not sure if anybody here read the article by Mr. Pat Spillane in, I think, The Irish Times, in which he spoke about the schools, the three children and the three teachers and how when something goes wrong in rural Ireland, we say it is dying or that we must go to Dublin to get help to fix the problem. He also spoke about a community, Kiltyclogher, and how it set out to identify its reality and restrictions and what it could do in that regard.