Ms Vanessa Tierney:

I am delighted to have been invited before the committee and I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for the invitation to discuss sustaining small rural and community businesses, smart communities, and remote working. I am joined by Ms Louise O'Connor. We launched Abodoo in Gorey in north County Wexford. We were a LEO client and have moved on to Enterprise Ireland. We launched a year and a quarter ago from a co-working space, so we have a personal story about the impact of co-working on our business.

I have been involved in recruitment and talent acquisition for more than 15 years. Seven or eight years ago I was restricted from working because of illness and I could not commute. It was then I began to realise that around the globe many professionals could be working but for whatever reason, such as family commitments or childcare, they are restricted from doing so. The reason we are here today is to speak about a successful pilot we ran in Wexford with the support of Wexford LEO and the local authority. We had a real opportunity to identify the skills in County Wexford and present them to companies considering locations throughout the country. If we look at Ireland, our unemployment rate is very low, which is brilliant, but we still have 79 unemployment blackspots throughout the country. Mirroring these with co-working capacity provides a real opportunity to position rural Ireland as an opportunity for companies.

There are three key pillars for inward investment in rural Ireland. The first is office space and capacity, and the Abodoo platform now lists more than 200 co-working spaces, which means there is at least one in every county. The second pillar is connectivity, and this is improving. From a remote working perspective, there are no connectivity challenges to working in rural Ireland at present because every county has connectivity and every co-working space has the best connectivity. I moved back from England four years ago to 3 Mb broadband in the house. We now have 140 Mb, so there is a real opportunity for companies. The third pillar required by Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland is the missing ingredient, and this is skills and talents. We must question why Facebook and Salesforce make announcements to employ people in Dublin when 700,000 skilled people from throughout the country could be employed. What is missing is the ability to provide data on them.

Until our pilot, information provided on the skills available was through the census and alumni information from various colleges. The way we have built Abodoo means we capture a lot of data on what people are looking for with regard to skills, salary expectations and connectivity. We were requested to produce a talent heat map of the available skills, initially just in technology, to present to some companies looking at the co-working space in Gorey. We ran the pilot over six weeks. We ran marketing campaigns above and below the line. We had advertisements on the back of buses showing a mother and son and a phrase suggesting spending more time with the real boss, and we had signs suggesting the train will miss you.

Over a few weeks, hundreds of people registered. We assumed they would be the tired exhausted commuters from Wexford to Dublin, but they have been a range of people, including those outside the country who want to come home but for whom house prices in Dublin are too expensive. They stated that if they could go to Wexford, they would return in a flash. We had people with mobility issues who cannot get to Dublin. There were also very skilled parents in their mid to late 30s who could not justify going to Dublin when the cost of childcare was added in. There were also older people who were not ready to retire. An array of people registered. We captured all of this, mined it for data and produced a talent heat map that gives granular information not only on technology skills but on exactly how many Python or Java developers there are.

One of the surprising facts that came out of the talent heat map was that salary expectations were 10% to 20% lower than in cities. I raise this as a very big point for employers.

Many employers think that they will have to make a significant investment to embrace smart working. However, they save on expectations alone because house prices can be lower by one third or a half. The other thing which surprised us was that only half the people were in Wexford. The other half were in Dublin or elsewhere and said that they wanted to return. We ran the case study this time last year. We provided it to the LEO, Enterprise Ireland, the county council and IDA Ireland. In September, IDA Ireland successfully landed the first company into the hatch lab. It intends to employ hundreds of people in the next three years. Significantly, it wants to embrace what we call smart working.

I will say something bold. I do not think Ireland is ready for remote working as people assume that means working from home. We are ready for smart working and more flexibility in our working model. Companies such as the one that has landed in Gorey intend to let people work two to three days in the co-working capacity and the other days at home. That means that even though the building has only seating for 300, 500 staff can be employed because of the use of hot-desking.

We have worked and collaborated with LEOs, county councils, IDA Ireland, and Enterprise Ireland, and we are undertaking a roadshow with the Small Firms Association to educate people locally. We are partnered with Grow Remote which is doing a great job at a community level. We have a national partnership with Vodafone, educating people around smart working and educating businesses about its benefits and value. We are looking to support Vodafone in opening up more gigabit hubs. The gigabit hubs initiative was launched in 2017. Since then, 29 new companies have moved their business to the hubs with an additional 80 people, with future plans for an extra 200 jobs over the next three years.

I will outline some of the benefits of smart working from a company's perspective. As a small country, 1.9 million people commute to work daily. People who sit in traffic are quite tired by the time they get to the office, particularly when children are thrown into the mix. It has been proven globally that attrition improves by 40% when employers embrace flexible working. Productivity increases by 15% and the overall saving to the company on average is €10,000 and to the individual is €7,000 annually. That is €7,000 that the individual can save. If such people are staying in their local community, we can ask where they are likely to spend this.

The LEOs have invited Abodoo to make a presentation to all their 31 offices in April about our work in Wexford with a view to where we can extend it. We are looking forward to this. We are building technology not only to pull talent to heat maps but in future to do things such as connecting people in co-working places at a local level so that people with similar skills can come together, as has been done in Offaly. We are launching smart working retreats - a lovely way to build on tourism - and leveraging the amazing co-working spaces that are coming up around the country, such as converted banks, to allow people to holiday and work here for a month. We are plugging in e-learning. The beauty of smart working, working from home, connectivity and co-working is that it is possible to learn from anywhere and upskill. That will be the future.

If we can work out a national plan for remote or smart working, it will have some key benefits. One is that it improves air quality by reducing carbon emissions. Spending in the local economy will increase. We can reduce unemployment in blackspots. We can give people back time that they can spend with their families. We are asking the Government's assistance on a number of areas in the coming years. First is help in introductions that would help us to fast-track the conversations that we are having county to county. Second, we seek support around talent mapping skills, extending what we have done in Wexford to the whole country. That would be data that we could provide to companies in Dublin, Cork and elsewhere as well as companies that are in talks with IDA Ireland about locating in Ireland. Finally, we seek support from the disruptive technology fund to mobilise the app that we are using, which is on the web, and localise it so that it is key to each county.

With 42% of the population living in rural Ireland compared with 27% living in rural areas across Europe, we have a real opportunity to become the smart working leader of the European Union. We can reverse the brain drain and bring back some of the half million people who have left our country in the past ten years.

We have provided the Wexford talent heat map to members for their information. I will conclude with our motto: life is a journey, not a commute.