Ms Vanessa Tierney:

There was a question about how we did it. It is multifaceted, as has been highlighted. There are many great groups on the ground, county to county. I am not with a connectivity company, but I can see that a lot of them are making great efforts to connect places; perhaps they are not all homes but certainly they are co-working spaces. A national framework for co-working is required. We have highlighted that in most cases employees are paying their subscription or membership in co-working. WeWork, a phenomenal global co-working company, announced last year that 35% of its members were employees of enterprise accounts. They are attracting the likes of Facebook and Microsoft and can do so because once somebody takes out a subscription with WeWork, there is global access. We suggest we can do the same with Abodoo because we have all 200 on our platform. We need to advance the technology to facilitate subscriptions. That conversation can be taken to the large enterprise and foreign direct investment companies.

There was reference to the national talent heat map. We are ready to go. We just need the green light for the provision of some funding. We achieved what we did quite economically in Wexford and leveraged all of the local public relations and marketing channels available through the council. It was affordable and we got a buy-in. Members will have read that many commuter studies have been carried out and I have spoken to five or six local enterprise offices about their commuter studies. They were great to help to create momentum, but they did not give the detailed and granular skills data that we needed for the finance companies who were seeking finance people in the south east, for example. The beauty of Ireland Inc. becoming involved in national talent mapping is that we would be able to demonstrate the peak or clusters of skills available in finance, for example. They could be available in Waterford or west Cork, when there is connectivity. They could be available in County Offaly. Companies could make decisions based on how they would land there. It is ready to go and no policy is needed. It is just a question of backing.