Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This is a fascinating debate. The possibilities are limitless. The last statement made, namely, that location is irrelevant, is probably 70% true. There are so many potential variations on this theme that the only limitation is our imagination. There is one irony in all of this, which is that decentralised Departments, apart from the Department of Education and Skills in Athlone and so on, were basically co-located working places. The further the digital revolution goes, the more the arguments against decentralisation fall. Did it really make a difference if, when one called the then Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, one thought that one was talking to a person in the Custom House when one was actually talking to someone in Ballina? No. It made no difference. Did the person physically have to be beside the person they were working with? No, not really. All of us, as Deputies, operate in different locations all the time. Most of us have our staff well away from where we are ourselves located. The only limits are literally in our own minds. I welcome the idea.

I have a few questions. The witnesses are talking about co-located places in Corr na Móna or wherever. I am looking for something like that in Corr na Móna, but only for one reason. Only 100 or so of the 400 houses around Corr na Móna have gigabit technology. The rest are on 5 Mb and cannot work from home. I know of many existing businesses that cannot get in the net so we need a co-located place within four or five miles so that they can be brought together and connected to gigabit Internet. Those who have direct connection to gigabit Internet are working from home.

I have a question that relates to that and two other questions. Everybody should have Internet access, that is, fibre to the home, with speeds of 1 Gbps. Mobile technology is no good because it is constantly subject to contention. It is great when one is out in the field or something like that but it is not a good basic technology when one wants to do work at home and everyone wants to work at the same time. I am very much in favour of the fibre connection to one's basic place of work and the other supplementary service. On what does the co-location part depend?

Who will avail of this? It was very interesting to see a report in the local authority information we get every day on the web to the effect that Dublin is the second or third most expensive city to live in when the cost of finding somewhere to live versus salary is taken into account. The obvious reason is that we are forcing people to live here. It is not that they want to be here, as we know from the number of Civil Service staff requests to transfer out of Dublin, which are eight or ten times higher than requests to transfer to Dublin. Businesses that employ high end people sometimes need to physically meet people. I have been arguing about what will happen with our highly educated rural people who work in the cities. It must be remembered that a higher percentage of people from rural areas have a higher level of education than people from urban areas. The percentage for Dublin is approximately 40% but in many areas of rural Ireland 55%, 60%, 65% and 70% of young people have a higher level of education. That does not show up in the statistics because when the census is taken they are all living in Dublin. However, if we go back to where they grew up and the schools they attended, we find the statistics show that access to third level education, if we take the entire span of Dublin, is much higher in rural areas. Why is that important? Many people when they reach their mid-30s are doing the reverse of what they were doing when they were 18. At 18 people want to live cities but when they reach their 30s they are thinking they would love to be living back in the country in a nice safe place and have their children attend the nice little school they attended. My prediction is that if we can get in the proper technology and get employers to think outside the box, we will have many people coming to the city two days a week to have their meetings and then work from home on the other three days. Most people now work six or seven days a week at home, on and off, because of access to computers. What is the Government doing to encourage that? It would sort out many of the traffic problems that are intractable in our cities.

Unfortunately, I was not here for the presentation because I was attending a meeting of the Dáil reform committee. The Government seems to be looking for jobs for people who do not have jobs. It is telling companies in the market that Ireland has many top class people who could work for them but they live in "Ballywherever". The solution it is offering, therefore, is to provide a centre in which jobs will be created. We have many advantages as a people in terms of servicing multinational companies, including that we are English speaking, friendly and helpful. Does the Government have a policy of telling IDA Ireland that the days of having to bring an entire factory here are over and that it could attract many jobs to Ireland, irrespective of location, be it from Tory Island to the corner of Wexford or from County Louth across to the tip of Kerry, without providing major infrastructure, factory buildings and so on? Will IDA Ireland be given the remit to ask all these multinational companies if they want top class out-workers? It is amazing that we are going back to the past when out-workers at home provided the big mills with product.

I will make one final point on what Mr. Ellingstad said. I do not know if people share my frustration but I hate dealing with telephone companies and banks now because I am put through to a call centre and speak to somebody at the far end of the world who does not know my problem and cannot solve it. I will be honest about that. It is not because they are far away but because one can never get back to the same person if one rings again. We need call centres where people can have human contact with someone who knows their file in the way bank managers or staff in telephone companies used to know our files 30 or 40 years ago. It does not make any difference if that person is based in the Arctic or the Antarctic Circle, provided he or she knows our case and understands where we are coming from. That will become the next selling point for companies. When we have a problem we do most things online to deal with it but when we need to talk to a human to sort out a problem, we need a human who understands it and can sort it. When we talk about no location, that might be physically true but it is not mentally or emotionally true. The small nature of society here means we are particularly good at connecting with people and problems. If companies were to go that extra step, they would do a fantastic marketing job for themselves.