Ms Joanne Mangan:

On the first question, in our survey, which is our map of remote employees and their employers around Ireland, we do ask the type of work the person is doing, so that data are something we will have available and that we are building on. There has been other research in this area. I cannot recall the organisation that did research on the types of jobs that can be done remotely - it was a consultancy, perhaps Deloitte or some company like that - but I can look it up after this meeting. As to what types of employment are more suitable to remote working, it did identify that it is more the knowledge jobs. We also see this at Grow Remote because we have a remote jobs board and we just recently launched a new one. Through the data from last year, we were able to pull what types of jobs were being advertised there. It was still quite heavily weighted towards tech jobs, that is, jobs in the technology sector, in software engineering and in data, and so on, but growing more and more are jobs in other sectors such as marketing, legal and sales. One very fast-growing area is customer service and support, and Shopify, HubSpot and eBay are good examples of companies with quite large customer support teams. A lot of that is moving to remote because these are jobs where the person is on the phone or email all day and does not have to be co-located with the customer, and as it is all done virtually, it can be done from anywhere.

Obviously, there are jobs that cannot be done remotely but, as I mentioned, we also need to keep an open mind about not boxing certain jobs into a non-remote box because what we are not seeing yet is the jobs such as administrative and secretarial jobs. What we would love to see is more of what we might call the more entry-level jobs and the less well-paid jobs becoming remote. What we definitely do not want to see is a type of two-tier inequality, where the really high-paying, high-quality, high-education and high-skills jobs are remote because there is a war for talent in that sector. We want to see companies being open-minded about making remote jobs available across the board if the job can be done remotely and if it is feasible to do so.

It is very important that graduates are upskilled and ready to adapt to remote working from day one. We have a training programme, Remote Work Ready, which we are developing right now to gear towards graduates. There are certain skills people need to learn to be able to work remotely. These are all very teachable and easy to pick up, but there are certain skills and a certain profile that people need to develop to be able to successfully work remotely.

I will pass on to Mr. Hegarty for the second question.