Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle for the opportunity to speak during this debate. First, I congratulate the Minister of State, Deputy Higgins, and wish her well.

Business and, indeed, all of enterprise is going through a period of rapid transition. Just looking out the back window, there was the financial crisis, followed by the Covid closures, the Ukraine crisis and the impact that has had on supply chains. Businesses have been buffeted repeatedly and, in the longer term, two huge transformations are coming, namely, the move to net zero and the sustainable use of resources, and the impact of digitisation and, in particular, artificial intelligence. Any of these changes coming individually would be a challenge, but they are all coming together and potentially that will be enormously disruptive.

The short-term difficulties are very real. We have seen the impact on not only cost but also demand, particularly from remote working and the changed lifestyles people are leading, and the change in the supply of labour, which has also been impacted by the availability of remote working and the greater difficulty in filling shifts, such as in the hospitality sector. I see many pressures coming onto such businesses, even more from the side of not being able to get staff than from the cost side. People who had thought that at this stage in their lives they would be able to take a more relaxed role in their business are absolutely up front. I really welcome, therefore, the package that is being debated here. I welcome the short-term measures on the cost side, but I particularly welcome the initiatives on the energy side, the innovation side and the skills side.

We are genuinely going through an industrial revolution of an enormous scale, given the force of transformation to reach net zero in the space of 25 years and to accommodate artificial intelligence, which really started to impact only towards the end of 2022. In two years, we will be transforming the face of many enterprises. We can see that creeping in certain areas but it will rise to a gallop. Those forces of change, in my view, are unstoppable and it can be sad at times to hear voices in this House saying forces such as moving to net zero are something we have an option to opt out of. Those farms or businesses that decide they are going to seek to opt out of the wind-down of fossil fuel or the reduction in other types of damaging emissions will be the ones whose businesses will not be viable in ten years. It is those that recognise that change has to be made, that seek to adapt and be agile, that will have a prosperous future.

The key challenge for the Government, however, is to recognise the pace of change which which enterprise is now going to have to live. The take-up of local enterprise office and Enterprise Ireland initiatives is very low in the area of energy efficiency measures, let alone in regard to moving to assess the impact of digitisation. There is a very slow process, and the challenge for many small businesses is they simply do not have the capacity to plan for those longer term challenges. There is a massive onus on the Government, therefore, to work with enterprise, both small and large, to anticipate the type of change and to sketch out for business where opportunities can arise. I commend decisions that have been taken, some of which I was proud to be involved in myself, such as the roll-out of the national broadband plan, which is truly transformative infrastructure that will gear up people for a new world, but we have not done enough to develop the opportunities that can arise on the back of it. Where are the strategies for the remote delivery of healthcare or education? There is the online voucher but that is a rather tame approach to the transformative nature that national broadband should be providing.

Offshore renewable energy is truly our moonshot, as the former Taoiseach used to describe it, but we need to recognise the pressure we are putting on cloud infrastructure companies, which are the feedstock for artificial intelligence and the ICT industry, in the short term. If we choke those in the short term to get over difficulties we have in our climate budgeting, we could easily jeopardise sectors that will be vital to the longer term utilisation of this moonshot opportunity. We need to be very careful, therefore, not to undermine some of the critical private sector infrastructure that will open the doors to not only the success of their own enterprises but also the opportunity for many small start-ups and businesses to thrive in their wake.

We have not yet traced out how a net-zero environment can be compatible with prosperous and thriving agriculture, in particular, and the food sector, in general, and that leaves a lot of people uncertain and uneasy about the coming change. We need to accelerate our capacity to portray what that changed future will be for farmers who are starting out in their lives or want to see what it will be such that they will still have prosperous farms in ten years.

We need to be braver. The former Taoiseach said one regret he had was that we were not bolder when reaching decisions. There is a natural caution but the pace of change we now face into is not compatible with an approach of caution. It must be more one of calculated risk-taking.

In the area of human resources, we will face massive changes. The OECD described our leaving certificate as one that is creating second-class robots. Artificial intelligence and the pace of change that is coming will put massive pressure on the adequacy of our education system. We need to think much more seriously, not only about reform for those who are now in school but, even more important, for those who are now at work whose jobs are facing very significant changes. The Minister of State, with her background being in this sector, is particularly well-equipped to look at that. The €1.5 billion training fund surplus the Minister of State pointed to should be focused in a very strategic way on equipping us to deal with these challenges.

Ireland needs to take a leadership position in equipping ourselves to adapt to the world that artificial intelligence will open up. It will create regulatory challenges and we should be the first to roll out and effectively implement the EU legislation in this arena and show we can deliver best practice in regulation. I believe best practice in regulation will be the environment in which best enterprise practice will also thrive. In the long term, it is only the responsible use of AI that will yield returns. We need to look more aggressively at what the uptake in the public service of artificial intelligence will mean. How will it transform the services we are delivering? How will we evolve education and skills? How will we make compact sustainable development, which is what we all need? We do not deliver compact sustainable development in this country. We build house estates and then build schools ten years late. We cannot be compatible with the sort of sustainable society we are trying to create if we do not have capacity to invest in a timely way.

We need to look at reformed public service structures that help us to plan for the pace of change that will hit our enterprises and our society. I fear we need to think afresh about that if we are to do it. The traditions of reliability, consistency and caution that are so strong in our public service need to be now tempered by a capacity to build internally the resources that can anticipate and agilely change systems in time to be at the leadership end rather than the laggard end of these massive changes. That is a serious challenge we need to anticipate. I know some Members of the House talk about a future commission. It do not think that would do it because it would hive off anticipation of that to some little group of experts in the corner. It has to be mainstreamed in the business of every Department. It is a challenge, in particular to the Taoiseach's Department and the Department of public service, to spearhead these challenges in a new way.

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