Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 1 July 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Business Growth and Job Creation in Town and Village Centres: (Resumed) ISME and New Generation Development

3:50 pm

Mr. Mark Fielding:

Through the ISME Skillnet, we certainly have a good number of training courses that we run for our members nationwide on how to become involved in online trading. There was always a thing about having a website, but it is about trading online. The answer is the education of our members, our member companies and their staff.

With regard to the provision of supports, there is not much point in giving vouchers to businesses to actually get them trading online if the broadband service is intermittent. What supports do we need? We need to have a good carrier in order that when we trade online, the service is not going to drop down in the middle. If this happens, not alone does one lose trade but one also loses a customer. That is the main area in which we have been involved and it is part of ISME's educational activities through Skillnet.