Ms Elizabeth Waters:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to address it today. For more than 30 years, An Cosán has been committed to empowering disadvantaged individuals to achieve their potential in Tallaght west.

Recently we scaled up our impact throughout the country using technology to connect entire communities to learning across Ireland. As a nation, we hold a top ten position globally in our proportion of STEM graduates from third level. That is an amazing statistic, but that needs to be set against the fact that only 48% of individuals have at least basic digital skills, which means that 52% do not. This is one of the lowest levels in the EU. The EU average is 57%. We are facing a digital divide of catastrophic proportions.

Globally, entire sectors of employment are threatened by digital innovation. One third of jobs in Ireland in agriculture, retail, transport, hospitality, manufacturing and low-paid jobs in the public sector are all at high risk of digital disruption. Today our Government is rapidly accelerating online delivery of public services, yet more than 40% of our citizens are disconnected or digitally disadvantaged. As ever those with lower levels of education are most impacted. The World Economic Forum has pointed to the need for retraining existing workforces, a proactive approach to their lifelong learning, and governments rapidly and creatively crafting a supportive environment to assist individual and organisational efforts.

An Cosán has been seriously concerned by the digital divide but we knew we could not tackle the issue alone; it required a collaborative approach. We have developed a very interesting model, which is a tripartite relationship across corporate, community and public sectors. Through collaboration, we create impact and are best placed to solve complex social questions. In the past two years, An Cosán has joined forces with top global companies, creating a model of partnership to tackle social issues. We have harnessed our resources and developed a strategic digital pathways framework and programme to significantly improve the digital skills of all our citizens and people in the workplace. We are discussing with SOLAS how the framework might align with and support further education and training provision.

In our submission, we have made a number of recommendations and I will focus on just two. We need a whole-society approach to a whole-society problem. We need to adopt that collaborative, cross-sectoral, integrated and strategic approach to bring all of the resources of the corporate, public and community sectors together to solve the digital divide problems we are facing.

We also recommend having a new Irish digital champion to spearhead a campaign, as we did years ago on literacy, to make people aware that we are facing a tsunami. Such a digital champion should encourage Irish citizens to check their digital skills to become digitally competent. Ireland could be an exemplar of how being a digitally competent nation appears. Alternatively, we could be like the UK where the digital skills gap is going to cost that country £141 billion. That is not where we want to go, but we need to act quickly.