Mr. Ken Tobin:

In 2016, my business partner, Tom O’Leary, and I set about funding and developing the first co-working hub in County Kerry, which is also one of the first in Ireland. As others noted, there are now more than 200 such hubs around the country. Privately funded and operated, HQ Tralee grew from one building in Tralee town centre in 2016, a property which had sat idle for more than nine years, to a second building in Tralee the following year, and in October 2018 we opened a third building, this time in Listowel, a small town about ten miles from Tralee.

Today our hubs provide a home for almost 200 people in County Kerry. We recognised the essential need for these spaces within Tralee and Listowel, like many other towns around Ireland. In total we have provided in excess of 15,000 cu. ft of shared office, co-working, meeting and community space within our hubs at a fraction of the cost of a space in a larger city. Our hubs all offer 1 Gb broadband connection using a combination of local Internet service providers and the SIRO-Vodafone’s gigabit hub initiative. We house a wide range of individuals and companies which are outlined in my submission.

I want to highlight some key factors that we have learned through our involvement with this industry, as one of the first groups to operate in Ireland. The committee will have heard from previous speakers, not only today, but also in recent sittings, that remote working, enabling broadband connectivity, and supporting hubs are critical to reviving and sustaining rural and regional towns. I will not reiterate the same things but rather demonstrate what has actually happened.

One of the key things we have learned over recent years is that the importance of these hubs is not solely on the service that it provides for companies and remote workers, but in their economic and social benefit to a town. In the past three years we have seen every day examples of how a hub and supporting people to return to a town can actually benefit the local economy. This is not just on a financial level, but it is worth noting that our hubs have an average salary of more than twice that of the local economy, which means double the spend per person in the locality.

On a human level, we have seen business owners and newly returned remote workers getting involved in supporting local Tidy Town groups, chambers of commerce, sports clubs, charities and volunteer organisations. One of the main benefits of working from a regional town, with low commute times and a better quality of life, is that these people have more time to get involved in organisations and causes that matters to them. As these individuals typically have been used to a city commute and a longer working week, they have more time on their hands to get involved. Nor is it just the town in which the hub is based that benefits. Returning remote workers and SME business owners are also opting to live in quieter villages or townlands near, but not in, the main town. Typically, the people we see returning are at the age that they are considering starting, or have recently started, a family. To a degree the companies and remote workers we have supported in returning to Tralee and Listowel have returned because they had a connection with the location. We have found it tough to attract back the younger generation in their mid-20s and graduates.

On a business level, there are two critical elements to providing this opportunity for regional and rural towns. The hubs support the growth not only of the businesses based within the hubs, but also the businesses in that town. This is not anecdotal, this is real. We see it every day ourselves. The support to businesses is very wide and varied. In view of time constraints, I will focus on a couple of key items. One area is staff retention. If any employer of an SME in Dublin or Cork in specific technical sectors is asked, he or she will respond that staff retention is the one thing that is killing their business. This issue of not being able to hang on to good staff is being compounded by a number of key factors over which this Government has an element of control. Quality staff are being hoovered up by the large multinationals, and invariably they are being lured from our indigenous companies at an alarming rate. We all welcome each announcement of the next Facebook, Google or Salesforce entering the Dublin market, but behind that is a real concern that smaller companies will not be able to retain their skilled staff. Each big announcement also adds even more pressure onto an already overheated housing market in our large cities, forcing even more people to seek housing farther out of the city, adding hours each day to their commute.

What the hubs in regional locations offer to these companies is an opportunity. I cannot stress this enough. We are selling ourselves short if we pitch these regional locations as a compromise. These regional locations are an absolute godsend to many indigenous SMEs. For example, a little over a year ago, one company joined us primarily because the larger companies in Dublin were poaching its staff.

Since coming down, this two-man operation has grown to seven people and by the end of 2019, will have grown to 20 people, purely because it is able to retain its staff based in a regional town.

To support staff retention, and to echo previous speakers, these hubs present a major opportunity for large organisations in Dublin to retain their staff by allowing them to work remotely, and have a better quality of life. We have seen this ourselves, but larger companies need to be put under greater pressure to allow their staff have this choice. As mentioned earlier, all bar one of our existing remote workers pay for themselves. Their companies will not support them. While they say they will support them, they will not financially support them to relocate to a regional location.

The second set of businesses that benefit from the hubs are actually not based in the hubs themselves. Those business are the local ones, the shops, restaurants and pubs, around the town. When we opened our first hub in 2016, we knew that the streets around our hub needed some support. Our first building in Tralee was a large vacant property. While a fantastic modern building, it had lain idle for over nine years and faced out onto a semi-derelict side street. We developed a plan to promote the neighbouring shops, bars and restaurants and help them raise their footfall. We formed a community of businesses that worked together which led to us taking on a privately funded regeneration project for the street around us in Tralee to such an extent that two new business opened up in that vacant street.

Listowel, where we opened our latest hub, did not need such support. They are national Tidy Towns award winners from 2018. Where they needed our support was on infrastructure. We placed too much emphasis on the national broadband roll-out. In the case of Listowel, we did not have access to high-speed fibre. We were faced with a choice of operating off 70 Mb broadband or doing it ourselves. Therefore, we engaged with a local Internet service provider and did it ourselves. We invested in that company. We supported that company to provide 1 Gb broadband to our building in Listowel, which is now available to the entire town.

I mentioned earlier that where we struggle is in attracting the younger generation to our hubs. Through my work with Tralee Chamber Alliance, Tralee's chamber of commerce, and connecting with chambers all over the country, I know that Tralee and Listowel are not unlike many towns in regional Ireland. There has been a drain of talent and younger people over the past number of years and a very visible cause and effect of this drain is the daytime vibrancy and nightlife in these towns. Our high streets are struggling, rural bars and nightclubs are in free fall, our institutes of technology are fighting the larger universities to attract students and as the cities grow and expand, the younger generation are being lured and retained there. Kerry, for example, now has the oldest average age in the country, and the statistics show that it has a dip in the mid-20s age bracket. After the collapse of the Celtic tiger when so many of our young people left Ireland, everyone cried foul for a lost generation. Today, the same thing is happening, only that they are emigrating from a rural to a city location.

When I started my submission, I said I would not focus on issues that others have looked at already. I want to finish with what we in business call "the ask". This is about connecting the dots and trying to see can we do this in an accelerated meaningful way. We already mentioned that there are more than 200 hubs around the country. More will be built but what we need to do is increase the demand for companies and remote workers to go to these regional locations. Based on our experience, we see two quick-win items that could be done now.

First, we see an immediate need for a Government backed team - supported by Enterprise Ireland, the LEOs and the local chambers of commerce - the sole remit of which is to connect SMEs in Dublin and Cork with regional town hubs and remote work organisations. Utilising the industry connections of Enterprise Ireland and the on-the-ground connections of the local chambers, this team should have the sole function of providing a funnel of companies and remote workers who want to escape the larger cities to set up in regional locations. This team, as was mentioned earlier, should have the backing of a dedicated incentive programme to support these companies and remote workers in their relocation. There are numerous examples, in the States and on the Continent, of successful incentive programmes where relocation assistance packages are provided to enable remote workers and SMEs to move to regional locations and these are done for a fraction of what is currently being spent on other avenues to create jobs. Not only would this have the benefit of supporting these regional towns but it would take the pressure off the larger cities.

Second, we need support in the regional towns to attract back and retain the younger generation and families. Without adequate funding to enhance the offering on the ground, younger workers will not consider these regional towns. Specific investment must be made in towns to increase their vibrancy and support the retail and service sectors so that younger workers do not feel like that they are compromising on their experiences. Locations must become more vibrant. I would suggest utilising the document, A Framework for Town Centre Renewal. My ask would be to legislate for the establishment of funded teams to support these regional towns. I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak.