Mr. Joe Cunningham:

The education side is incredibly important, particularly in encouraging more children - especially girls - to do higher level maths. There is a need to provide the relevant courses in schools and get children excited about them. I am the parent of a number of primary schoolchildren and when I meet other mothers and fathers in the schoolyard, I discover that they are all excited about technology. They talk about encouraging their children to take an interest in technology and join CoderDojo while still in primary school as opposed to waiting until they go to secondary school. There is a demand on the parents side, but there are still issues on the education side in putting ICT in place in schools. I do not refer to kids sitting in front of computers and playing games but to actually becoming involved in development, programming and other interesting things which will stimulate their minds. If we could do this in the education sector, it would be great.

On the tech industry side, we need to bring on board those people who are going to develop these graduates when they emerge from colleges in three to four years time. I built businesses in the 1980s and 1990s and we brought in emigrés from Philips, Siemens, AT&T and other companies across the globe. We built a tremendous tech industry in the 1990s by bringing on board Irish people who had travelled abroad and obtained six, seven or eight years' experience and building businesses around them. The people concerned remained in Ireland and it is not possible to attract any others like them. As a result, we must bring in people from abroad who possess the type of top-tier skills around which we can build businesses.