Witnesses and members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or otherwise engage in speech that could be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative to comply with any such direction that I might make.

Members attending remotely are reminded of the constitutional requirement that, to participate in public meetings, they must be physically present within the confines of the place the Parliament has chosen to sit, namely, the Leinster House complex. In this regard, I ask any members participating via Microsoft Teams to confirm they are on the grounds of the Leinster House complex if they wish to contribute to the meeting. I remind all those in attendance to make sure their mobile phones are switched off or on silent mode.

Today's meeting concerns discussions on remote and blended working and community hubs. I thank the witnesses for attending to discuss these very important matters. As a committee, we look forward to engaging with the witnesses and gaining insights into the developments regarding remote and blended working and how related hubs impact communities. I welcome from Grow Remote Ms Tracy Keogh, chair, and Dr. Eoin Byrne, employer services manager; from the Western Development Commission, Mr. Stephen Carolan, head of connected hubs and digital innovation, and Dr. Aisling Moroney, policy analyst; and from the University of Galway, Dr. Ann O'Brien, community engagement manager, school of geography, archaeology and Irish studies, and Professor Eoin Whelan, business analytics and society.

I invite Ms Keogh to make her opening remarks.

I thank the members for having us here today. I was first here in 2019 with a vision for how remote work could drive social impact across Ireland. We are very grateful for all of the support to enable us to achieve that since 2018. In particular, the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht has been instrumental to us and our work. Today, we return with a new vision for what we can achieve in the next one to two years, building on what works and scaling up those programmes.

Let me start by anchoring what we mean. Remote work is a spectrum that goes all the way from nomadic gig work to structured hybrid. In the middle, there is something that we are focused on, namely, PAYE employment that is location agnostic, with tax revenue and employment rights. These jobs can land anywhere in the world, and we want them to land in Ireland, first, and in our regional and rural communities also. We focus on this, as it is a first principles driver of many other impacts from economic, social and environmental. I have 500 stories of those impacts for the committee, not that I will read all of them out today.

Joe Whelan lives on Inishturk, an island off Mayo, as the members will all know, with a population of 60 people. For years, working meant leaving the island on a Monday and taking a ferry to the mainland. After he went through our training programmes, he secured a full-time job and is working from home. The school also stayed open, but that is a whole other story. Indra Cawley from Mullingar is a multilingual person and struggled to find remote roles to match her skill set in Mullingar because all of those jobs were in Dublin and Cork. Through our training programme, she moved into data analytics and secured a remote role with an international employer. Patrick lives in a crossroads town - a pub, a shop, a GAA pitch and a church. He landed a remote role with a multinational with a salary of €130,000, a job a skilled remote worker got through his local community. That income is going directly into the local economy. I have 97 pages of stories of impacts like this that Grow Remote has created.

The key to winning these jobs was not just their core skill sets, but also "remote" as a skill. We have trained over 3,000 people thanks to SOLAS, the Laois and Offaly Education and Training Board, LOETB, and the IDA, and we are the largest training programme in Ireland. As part of our work there and with the Department of enterprise - this is the most interesting piece - we have already started getting remote-first employers to sign letters of intent to hire in Ireland ahead of a national target being set. These employers told us exactly what they need. RevenueCat, for example, a firm with a $500 million valuation, told us:

We don’t care where somebody is. We care about who they are and what they can do. The only thing a government influences is to make sure you build a population of people that are exceptionally capable and a community to sustain them.

The capability it is referring to is the capability to do that job, but also to do that job remotely. Remote employers - and I can list them off - all say the same thing, namely, "remote" is a skill and it is very difficult to find in Ireland.

We have put all of the infrastructure in place in terms of broadband and coworking spaces and hubs. The final pieces are the soft supports to layer on top of that - skills, community and propositions. That is what we know works to empower a person to land a remote job and we need investment in these things.

Once we have built our reputation for providing companies with the best remotely skilled talent and established our reputation as such, we will see more and more companies making the decision that Shopify, Wayfair and those companies that signed the letters of intent we have to ring-fence a percentage of their workforce to the tax jurisdiction of Ireland, which is the best of both worlds.

Systemic collaboration is now necessary to build on the wins we have had already. Employers need expert supports to make the transition to remote - it is very challenging - and a dedicated proposition to hire here. Employees need to be ready for these remote roles and the remote employment opportunities. There are, on average, 100,000 remote jobs across Europe that are available in Ireland every month.

Only when the various parts of the ecosystem - agencies, stakeholders and government - work together with the sole focus of landing jobs across Ireland will the infrastructure and investment to date bear fruit. We are currently shaping the next Our Rural Future strategy.

We ask that remote employer engagement, community programmes and remote working as a skill be written into that strategy as a named delivery mechanism, with a target for jobs landed in rural and regional places. The jobs are here. The people are here. The infrastructure is here. We now need to connect them together in a concerted, focused and systemic way.

I thank everybody for their time.

I thank members for their invitation to attend the meeting this morning to discuss the topic of remote and blended work.

The Western Development Commission, WDC, is a statutory body established in 1997 to promote social and economic development in the western region - the counties of Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo, Roscommon, Galway and Clare. It has a statutory obligation to advise the Government on issues that impact on the western region and to promote Government policy directed at improving social and economic standards in the region. It manages the WDC investment fund, which provides loans and equity to businesses and local communities in the region. The Western Development Commission has long-standing expertise in remote and blended work. It was a pioneer in what was previously called teleworking or e-working and is itself a remote-first organisation, with staff based throughout the region.

As a regional development agency, we have long seen remote and blended work as a key driver in achieving a range of regional development and regional rebalancing goals. In decoupling some types of employment from location, remote and blended work can enable more people to live and work outside of traditional large urban employment centres while still accessing high-quality jobs. For rural communities, this provides a boost to local economies and a shift towards a more balanced demographic profile. It increases the long-term viability and vitality of smaller towns and villages by building and sustaining demand for housing, schools and other public and commercial services. For people working in some occupational groups, moving home or reversing the traditional brain drain is more of a possibility than ever. Remote and blended work also relieves pressure on transport infrastructure as well as on housing and public services in urban areas and the commuter belts of our cities. Overall, it supports the place-based approach of the national development plan, NDP, and aligns with regional population targets under the national planning framework, NPF.

Census data tells us that the number of people working mainly from home increased by 173% between 2016 and 2022. The more recent Central Statistics Office, CSO, labour force survey from quarter 4 of 2024, which is more reflective of a return to normality after the Covid surge, shows approximately 19% reported usually working from home, down slightly from 20% in quarter 4 of 2023. In contrast, those sometimes working from home rose from 14% to 16%, indicating that blended working patterns remain strong.

Since 2021, and working with partners in the University of Galway, the WDC has carried out three separate national remote work surveys. We did these to better understand both remote workers and remote working. Some of the findings of the most recent survey carried out in 2023 with 5,929 respondents should be of interest to the committee. More information on that is available on our website. Of these respondents, 39% were working fully remotely with 59% having a hybrid or blended pattern. In terms of occupation, 42% were professionals, 25% were managers, directors and senior officials, and 15% had administrative or secretarial roles. Some 64% worked in the private sector and 32% in the public sector. Salaries were significantly above national average, with 44% on a salary in excess of €70,000 per annum and 29% between €50,000 and €69,999. Similarly, education levels are typically high with 5% holding doctoral qualifications and 36% with master's degrees. Of particular note among respondents was the really significant value attached to the capacity to work remotely or in a hybrid way, where 92% indicated that remote or hybrid working would be a key factor in their decision to change employer. If their remote work preferences were not facilitated, 44% said they would change job even if it meant a pay cut while 47% said they would do so even if it meant reduced career opportunities.

The Western Development Commission is about to embark on a further iteration of the national remote work survey in collaboration with a postdoctoral researcher and other colleagues at Atlantic Technological University. We will further extend our focus to include more qualitative on-the-ground research and case studies on the impacts of remote and hybrid work on health and well-being and on local and rural economic resilience and sustainability. Running alongside this work is our current involvement in the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, working group on remote and hybrid work. This will produce a report towards the middle of this year.

The Western Development Commission’s most significant contribution in this area is our role as project manager and implementer of a national initiative known as Connected Hubs, which is being implemented in partnership with the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht as part of the Our Rural Future policy. Hub working, also referred to as coworking, is the practice of multiple businesses or individuals working from the same building or hub. In this environment, employees may share amenities like desks, privacy booths or meeting rooms, and can also have own-door offices within the hub depending on the physical layout. Hubs are often populated by freelancers, remote workers, entrepreneurs, start-ups, scale-ups, and small businesses. The Connected Hubs network encompasses a wide range of stakeholders, spanning public, private, business, voluntary and community groups, resulting in a diverse hub ecosystem in terms of the capacity, scale of facilities and services offered. The development of hubs had initially occurred organically but also includes long-standing investments by Enterprise Ireland in the development of enterprise centres. There are currently 407 hubs nationwide live on the Connected Hubs platform, consisting of enterprise hubs, scaling hubs, coworking hubs, research and development hubs, community and enterprise hubs and some broadband connection points. More information is available on connectedhubs.ie.

The network, which began in 2019, provides a vehicle for individual hubs to come together under a shared identity to make a significant contribution to the revitalisation of Ireland’s towns and villages through the promotion of hub working. The aims of the project were and remain to establish a coherent national hub network and to build and maintain an online shared booking and hub management platform for all hubs on the network. Our Rural Future has set a target of 400 hubs to be brought on board by 2025. This was met and has now been exceeded. Other aims are to create a shared brand and common marketing campaign to raise awareness of hubs, the services they offer and the opportunities to relocate to, or establish a business from, anywhere In Ireland and to contribute towards carbon reduction targets through reduced commuting and reduced home working.

Connected Hubs is part of a larger initiative referred to as the national hub network. A national hub network interdepartmental group was established in October 2020 to oversee the strategic development of this initiative. Chaired by the Secretary General of the Department of rural and community development, it includes representation from the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment and other key Departments, State agencies and relevant public bodies to ensure that, from the outset, all stakeholder interests are part of the decision-making process on the development of the initiative. A strategy working group was subsequently established to progress the development of a national strategy to provide a roadmap for the future development of the national hub network. This strategy is now at sign-off phase, with publication expected in the coming months.

Connected Hubs also has an active programme of international engagement, working with partners across Europe and beyond to share learning on hub development and remote and blended working. This includes structured knowledge exchanges with counterparts in Scotland, Finland, France and Estonia on the future of work and regional development, and participation in EU-funded and cross-Border initiatives such as PEACEPLUS and shared island. There is much still to learn about remote and blended work, including its impact on individual workers, employers, the economy and wider society.

While remote and blended work offer significant benefits, the transition also presents some challenges. These include unequal access across sectors and regions, the need for shifts in infrastructure spending, management and productivity adaptation, and, for workers, risks of social isolation. Through our Connected Hubs network and our ongoing research and policy work, the Western Development Commission will continue to play our part in mitigating these challenges and advocating to ensure that the benefits of remote and blended work are shared broadly and sustainably, and that both a sense of place and community remain at the heart of this transition.

We are happy to answer any questions that members of the committee may have and to provide any further details that may be required.

I thank the committee members for the invitation. With me is Professor Eoin Whelan, who is co-author of the paper the committee is interested in. Our research explored the process of developing a sense of community in rural hubs. We found that hubs were at the intersection between remote employees, entrepreneurs and rural communities. Rural hubs could be a conductor for equitable rural digital transformation. This is particularly important for the western region, as it is now four years since the European Commission downgraded the western and north-western regions to a lagging status. As the region is increasingly and significantly less well-off compared to the European average, it is now the only region in the country in economic stagnation. Targeted actions are needed to address these challenges, and rural hubs can provide an important focal point for these.

There is an inherent tension in remote working in shared spaces. Users have different requirements, which each need different physical configurations depending on the extent to which each individual needs a space to work. Depending on the person, these can be quiet or not so quiet. Reflecting these needs of users in the creation of the ideal workspace is important in hubs. We described this as the person-environment fit. This helps users find a sense of belonging in the hub. Of course, people probably make up probably the most important aspect of the environment and space to interact away from the workspace is essential to support interactivity. We found that the most successful hubs responded to local needs.

They created a community of users and provided a professional space with high-quality digital connectivity and ample opportunities for interaction between hub users. These users came from a wide variety of backgrounds, across digital and non-digital roles.

Notable in the most vibrant hubs was the presence of an anchor tenant who provided informal mentoring, when sought, for younger workers. This was mentioned by several people entering the workforce and women hub users. At the time of this study, we found differences in the experience of remote working among women with young children in particular, indicating that childcare remained a challenge.

Access to hub networking was a benefit of the most successful hubs. Users described the ability to discuss broad work-related issues there. This often related to new regulations. One group even suggested working together in the future. The group was in the construction industry. In the digital services sector, many examples of hub users creating new connections or working together were found.

The hub network often included local knowledge. Many hub users moved to the area specifically for the landscape, for a safe, beautiful space to work and raise their families. For many people it was a new start, and local knowledge was a very important part of settling in the area. Many of these users also described the importance of giving back to local areas as part of creating a sense of belonging in the area. They did this by joining clubs, supporting local businesses and causes and sometimes even bringing the company they work for to the locality for team-building and work events.

Promoting the use of hubs by public sector employees is an opportunity to "join the dots" for both employees and the public. One example described in the research is from a gteic rural hub in Donegal. This could be an excellent opportunity to promote digital inclusion and opportunities for the public to access services in their local areas. A wide disparity in the implementation of rural hubs by local councils was identified in this research at that time. Clare County Council and DigiClare were leading the way at the time of the study. Importantly, hubs can provide a space to promote local social enterprise in an enabling environment.

A follow-on project at University of Galway takes a place-based, community-led, flexible approach to co-created capacity-building education in rural areas using rural hubs. Sustainable Communities is an innovative, blended, co-created and multidisciplinary course for communities. It consists of staff at the university working with local communities, co-led with local development agencies Mayo North East and Galway Rural Development and supported by the business school in University of Galway. The use of these hubs is supported by Connected Hubs and Údarás na Gaeltachta.

I thank the committee for its time.

Thank you, Ms Keogh, Mr. Carolan and Dr. O'Brien, for your opening remarks. I invite members to discuss now.

I thank Deputy Peter Roche, who has facilitated me with this slot. I am not usually on this committee. I am really excited to see all the witnesses. I thank them for the transformational work they are all doing independently and together. I have met many of them over the years.

When it comes to remote work, there is a debate happening that focuses on traditional work and how we shoehorn remote work into traditional work. Do the witnesses think the debate that should be happening is about remote-first work and the potential of remote-first work that exists right here, right now? When I talk about entirely remote-first work, I am talking about high-value, skilled, pensionable jobs that could be landed in Ireland. I am looking at the success story Ireland has been in relation to foreign direct investment and seeing the potential of remote first for Ireland. I want to capture those jobs. I want to see a strategy that capitalises on this opportunity for Ireland. I think this is the future. To me, that means we need a Government strategy to target those jobs, we need the skills to land them, we need the training for employers and employees to adapt to this opportunity and we need the ecosystem and the structures to support them. That is my initial question. Is the debate focused in the wrong place? However, I do not want the witnesses to focus on that too much because then we would be going down that road too. Let us talk about the opportunity in front of us and about the next strategy for jobs that we can bring to Ireland that is part of Ireland's success story economically and for communities. I will go with Ms Keogh.

I thank Deputy Currie for her contribution. Yes, we have often described the remote working system as being like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Down at the bottom, foundational to everything, are your hubs, your broadband, your hard infrastructure. Sometimes, however, that can be compared to having office spaces in Dublin but no IDA, EI or soft supports layered on top of that to ensure we are filling those buildings with the best career opportunities available to everybody. What we need to do next is layer on top of that. There are 100,000 remote careers available within Ireland every month. We soft-launched our campaign for a target. Five hundred people signed up in a matter of days, with no added support of driving that out. There were no media around it or anything. They are asking for this. They are finding it challenging to get remote jobs, and there are a bunch of barriers around that. We have examples of where that has worked for people to land remote jobs sporadically or ad hoc but we need to bring it together now. Because we are so well set up in the silos, there is an opportunity for monumental wins. We got our first letter of intent signed last week, a company that is doubling its workforce across EMEA. Its CEO is coming over in April. We were the only country to go to it and ask, "When you can hire anywhere, what's going to encourage you to ring-fence those jobs to Ireland?" It had answers; we said, "Cool, we'll deliver on those answers." Those jobs, instead of being available across Europe, will be available across Ireland. Then we have to funnel them into ideal places and to everybody who will get the most impact, but that is where we are going. That is the most exciting thing. Then they have co-working stipends. We know that these remote workers volunteer in their local community. All of that comes from driving those jobs here, but nobody is focused on the jobs.

I completely agree with Ms Keogh. We need a mindset-----

Shift.

-----shift. I think a lot of the tools are already there. They might be focused on landing other jobs to Ireland. We have often talked about the fact that politicians do not get the red ribbon moment when they land remote jobs the way they would for jobs based in their community, but they are still jobs coming to Ireland. The tools are there; we just need to repurpose them for remote first.

Yes, but it is a mindset shift. We have had the right to request on one side and the hub strategy on the other but we have not had a remote work strategy or engagement with these remote employers. The shift is understanding how these jobs come into Ireland. I know that employer in the crossroads town. It was advertising that job in the United States. It ended up here through a referral, but that was some highly skilled person in their bedroom doing an interview in Minnesota and that job landing here. It is not counted and it is not tracked. How do we scale it? Which political representative gets the credit? Nobody. We are completely forgetting it.

Then, to the earlier point about the media, etc., being focused on the right to request, bad employers, calling them dinosaurs and a return to the office, none of that is effective for moving forward. We have been on this every single day for eight years. It is not effective for moving forward.

How much time do I have left?

You have two minutes.

Does anybody else want to speak to that?

Maybe Mr. Carolan, Dr. O'Brien or Dr. Moroney.

I can speak to the hub aspect of that. Deputy Currie acknowledged that we are working together, and we have been trying to join up the thinking around this. I am advocating for hub working, which is the other option. There are the three Hs: the home, the HQ and the hub. What we are seeing is a lot of the Irish SMEs beginning to look towards the hubs now, beginning to realise there is a potential here to attract people into a professional working experience, a professional working environment, and beginning to use the hubs more sensibly. There is a lot of work to be done in raising awareness about what hub working is and all the rest of it. It is still a new enough concept, but that is what we are seeing here. We are also seeing it having a role in talent retention and talent attraction and companies beginning to see they can hire talent anywhere in the country and can base them in one of these hubs. That rules out maybe sometimes the isolation that can come from working remotely 100% of the time.

A blend is what we are advocating for. I mentioned the national strategy that is being developed on hub work. That is very much in the sign-off phase now and is ready to be published in the coming months.

There is also the international interest we are getting from other jurisdictions. We have an active pilot with Finland and France at the moment and are working with Estonia and Scotland. They are looking at how the Irish Government is getting behind hub working and hub networking, and its approach to the whole remote working piece or blended working. We have an opportunity here to be the leaders in this across Europe.

I completely agree.

I thank all the witnesses for being here. No more than Ms Keogh, I am eight years battling this drum as well. It was a proud day when we got the recognition of hubs as part of the programme for Government in 2020. We have come a long way but we a long way more to travel on it. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge Forge Works in Gort, Comworks in Loughrea and Portumna Courthouse, which are all part of Connected Hubs. That is only a small part of east Galway on the side closest to me. I am not saying this about anyone here, and I am sure Dr. O'Brien has come across all of this in her research, but there is a lack of ambition. I do not say any one of the witnesses is lacking ambition. I am saying maybe there is a part within officialdom that lacks that ambition or understanding about the potential within remote working. I am part of remote working and of Grow Remote. My friend Mary, aka Elodie, is a chapter lead in Portumna.

The reason I am into this is I held an open day at my clinic in Portumna in relation to remote working. A number of people came into my clinic to discuss it. In one instance, a bank director said that if we could stop about 200 of the cars going across the bridge in Portumna down to Limerick because we are struggling on space, we could do exactly as Mr. Carolan said. We could do home, HQ and the hub. The hub is the really good part. Social isolation and the engagement piece were talked about but, at the same time, we give lifestyle and choice back to people and we also populate and grow our communities in rural Ireland.

I hear Ms Keogh clearly in relation to the strategy and needing a template to drive forward. On the other hand, Mr. Carolan is clearly telling us that there is an appetite for doing this and we need more of an understanding. The research Dr. O'Brien has done is saying we could also use some of the public services going into this. What do the three of them need to connect to put a proposal to Government to put that into action? Coming from the west, and my colleagues will talk about the north west, this is a game-changer. Comworks in Loughrea is full every single day. It brings synergy to a derelict building. It is the same in Portumna Courthouse and Forge Works. It is new employees who are buying the cups of coffee and doing the shopping before they go home. It is the revitalisation of areas that perhaps would have been overlooked by FDI and the IDA. That is the part I am talking about. A lot of those buying cottages in rural Ireland for which the Minister, Deputy Browne, is giving grants to be done up are remote workers. They have a different outlook for how they approach their community. Dr. O'Brien is nodding, so I will let her start. What do we need to do? What is she asking us to do?

The Senator is absolutely correct in saying there needs to be more ambition. There has been a very narrow perspective on what remote working is. That very localised view has been taken rather than looking up at the horizon a little to what we could be and could do. Broadening that ambition is a big part of it, as is bringing the different sectors together to try to work forward with a vision together of what could be.

We were very well-supported in starting this initiative off in 2019. Obviously, Covid was a big help. Great vision was shown by the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Minister, Heather Humphreys, at the time because Connected Hubs was initially a regional initiative and regional pilot just for the west. It was a kind of east-west rebalancing initiative and was scaled up to a national initiative. I would like to see more support, which is coming through the national hub strategy, with more emphasis behind it and more discussion across Government about the potential of these hubs. The Senator talked about the regeneration of town centres and all of that. It has a huge role to play in that as well.

I will add to what Dr. O'Brien said. I am from Loughrea and have been to Comworks. It is a vibrant place. In the research Dr. O'Brien and I did, we visited a lot of these hubs. Some of them are very vibrant and full of energy and people want to go there. Others have the infrastructure, the building and great Wi-Fi but no one really wants to use them. There is no energy. What I would like to see in the next phase, to answer the Senator's question, is scale. What is it that works in Comworks, or other hubs that people want to use, that does all the great things about bringing people back to the economy, developing microeconomies and things like that? What works there and can we roll that out to other hubs?

I will answer for what works in that hub. What works is there is the opportunity, no matter what your size, for it to address your need. It is also able to look at social media, it has a podcasting studio and it also puts on talks on a Monday evening that bring in the outside community to understand what it has going on. That diversification is what makes a connected and remote working hub work really well.

Ms Keogh is the master of a lot of this on the Grow Remote concept. She knows the Elodie I talked about. We have an awful lot of Elodies who prefer to work at home. They are not interested in going to hubs, apart from maybe the one day a week. Bank of Ireland played a huge role at the time in providing spaces on Mainguard Street. I am also thinking of the port-a-sheds, which I should not have forgotten. They provide that one-day-a-week opportunity, predominantly. Some people just do not need to go to hubs all the time.

I will be a little annoying; 13 out of ten annoying as Graham Harron and my team would say. I will re-anchor all the time that spectrum of remote work, the structured hybrid and the location-agnostic first. On that basis, I will pass this over to my colleague, Dr. Byrne. Before I do that, I thank the Senator for her contributions on the ground since 2018. I am very grateful for that. She clearly spent time with the issue and that makes setting the ambition and setting policy work a lot easier. I thank her for that.

To speak to what my colleagues also talked about, remote work is the single biggest change to how we live and work in centuries. Obviously, with that kind of scale and pace of change, it takes a lot of time to get up to speed. It is to the credit of successive governments and departmental policy that Ireland is already a leader in Europe on that, whether it is infrastructure for the hubs or the training provision that Laois and Offaly Education and Training Board has been delivering.

What we are now seeing, with the run of data that is coming around, is that this interconnectivity between the various silos we have in terms of the infrastructure really needs to be linked up. Grow Remote works on a supply and demand model of change. We work with the supply of jobs and employers and we see the demand from employees and communities. What we are seeing there is very much a spectrum. There is no one answer that fits everyone. For example, if you are in a fully remote job, you can live anywhere in Ireland. There might be vouchers there. There could be more incentives, for example, to get you into your local community hub to join up with more community groups. Again, that is down to visibility and accessibility. Meanwhile, a hybrid worker is still bound to location in a way that is not the same for remote-first jobs. For example, a hybrid worker in Dublin pretty much has to be in the Leinster region, which is another issue.

What we are seeing now in this push for interconnectivity between all the various parts is that it is about bringing people along on the journey. The pace of change is terrifying at times. A lot of employers, when they think of fully remote, think of Covid. As we always say, Covid and remote work was an example of crisis management. It kept the economy on the road and made the Irish economy very resilient at an unprecedented time of upheaval, but there needs to be more support for those employers in bringing them along the journey to show them there is a possibility to be remote first and to thrive in that kind of setting. Likewise, as we see now, the demand for remote work from employees and communities is higher than it has ever been.

On LinkedIn, 90% of all jobs traffic shows people seek remote jobs even though only 10% of all jobs posted on the website are fully remote. When we talk about interconnectivity it is about linking employers with employees and bringing everyone along on a journey. Again, it is to Ireland's credit where we have gotten to date that we have a lot of this infrastructure. Now, we must join it all up so we can continue to build on those wins.

I thank all the guests for their participation. Their submissions and statements have been illuminating.

All of us in this room can see the advantages of remote working and the whole spectrum of remote work, as Ms Keogh mentioned. We need see remote work from being a perk to being a right, an entitlement and a norm. That goes for employers, employees and public policy.

Anecdotally, and having spoken to people, workers at the very least have a clear preference for the ability to work from home so the first H as opposed to the third H, which is a hub. I am sure there are many arguments for each option, and that the respective pieces of research by the witnesses will show the advantages of one option over the other on different factors. Is more research required, using research results as a starting point, on the possibilities, pitfalls and advantages of working from home? I refer to the person who has a desk in his or her spare room, if they have one, in the corner of a kitchen or wherever it might be for remote working and dips into the hub on occasion for in-person meetings. Is there scope for more research on that?

It is clear to all of us that remote working has clear family benefits, social benefits and environmental benefits in terms of transport and the environment, as well as community benefits because people have more time. Recently Ms Keogh and I spoke about the fact that people have more time to contribute to their local club, to sit on the board of their school, credit union or whatever it might be. Has research been done on that? If so, what were the findings? All three sets of witnesses can respond.

There has been some international research but not enough done in Ireland. As Mr. Carolan outlined, in our forthcoming research with Atlantic Technological University we will expand the remote work survey to do some more on-the-ground research case studies which may include pilot towns or villages. We intend to do a deep dive on that and the impact made by remote work.

On some of the points made by other Deputies, conventional thinking is very much one of capital first and jobs after. There is a factory, FDI or whatever and along with that are spillover effects. With remote work we must try to integrate people more into both the economic and social systems to avoid having just groups of isolated workers who perhaps have high salaries and spend money in the community. It must be a lot more than that because otherwise we will miss out on all the other things that go along with having perhaps the more conventional businesses. There is so much work to be done, as Dr. Byrne pointed out. We are really only at the beginning stages of this research. Certainly, our forthcoming ATU research will address some of these issues. I am sure that it will be one of many pieces of research that will be done. WDC is a member of the NESC's working group which is comprised of some researchers who are doing really good work. Of course the unions and employers' groups are very interested. There is a growing body of work being done and more work needs to be done. The WDC is really interested to see the results of our deep-dive research and learn how remote working affects people's health. We have a sense of these things. The research has not been done yet but we are definitely progressing that way.

I reiterate the point made by Dr. Moroney. There definitely needs to be more research done in this space. Yesterday, we published a research paper and one of the particular issues faced by people working from home, as opposed to a hub, is that they heavily depend on technology to do their work. They often get stressed when that technology does not work as well as it should which results in what we call "techno stress". When these people are in the office, in the headquarters, usually the infrastructure is fairly good and techno stress is not an issue at all, which is a finding of our study. If those people, instead of working from their bedroom at home or whatever, could go to a remote hub that does have the proper facilities then they would not experience techno stress and loneliness. There is a body of research to be done around what interventions can be made for the remote worker so they do not experience technology-induced stress.

I wish to mention the results of one of our forthcoming studies because it feeds into Deputy Currie's first question on ensuring in this space that Ireland is attractive to companies. We know from our study that it is not easy for a company to move from employees being fully in the office to hybrid or remote work, and that to do so companies require a lot of resources, training and education. We also found that a situation whereby a worker wants a hybrid arrangement with two days working in the office, but the employer wants the worker to work three days in the office, creates a conflict which negates the benefits of remote work.

The Deputy is right to mention loneliness. In our study we found that loneliness can be a factor. When companies invest in social supports they do a lot of it in the office to attract employees into the office but not so much in building social supports for their employees who work remotely. We have some indications that they are the issues. We would like to see more research done in this space on supports for remote and hybrid workers.

My last question is for the delegation from Grow Remote. If the Government gave Grow Remote a big cheque to write the strategy and it promised to faithfully implement the strategy, and if Grow Remote believed the Government, what would be the key points?

A strategy on how to make remote work more interconnected has three main pillars. First, we must look at community and community infrastructure, as we have seen with the national hubs scheme. That is about imbedding remote work within communities to combat social isolation, which can come with remote work, to allow for those extra hours of volunteering to go back into the community. Again, we have a lot of that infrastructure yet it can remain siloed.

Second, as Professor Whelan has just said, we must provide supports for employers to make the transition to remote work or even get a bit better at providing hybrid because it is incredibly difficult to do so. Ask any business owner and he or she will say that it is quite difficult to run a successful business and have those structures and everything in place. To do so remotely, having never done it before, makes it twice the challenge. We already have existing examples. At Grow Remote, we run consultancy and training programmes for employers and managers who want to make that transition. That could be scaled up because every year the demand for our courses cannot meet the provision of it. Employers require more supports to encourage them to make that transition. Again, we have found having talked to employers that there is a misconception that remote working is solely to do with the bad years of Covid and employers are not equipped to do it, while there are supports available to do so.

Fundamentally, the third pillar that brings the first two pillars together and allows interconnectivity between all these silos is that focus on the jobs because we cannot talk about the benefits of remote work without talking about remote jobs. For us, the third pillar has two big elements that feed into the other ones. The first element is setting the target for remote employment in Ireland, whether that is from indigenous Irish companies to make the transition or from the international jobs that Ms Keogh spoke of that are hanging in the air and we are not really making a concerted effort to draw them down. The second element is how we can embed them in communities, track them, provide supports and use the national hubs strategy to inform the local community of these jobs and, likewise, how we can bring employers on the journey to show that there are hubs in every community across Ireland where there are skilled remote-work employees. For us the three pillars are jobs, community and training in skills to help employers transition.

I thank all the witnesses for coming here. I want to discuss the fact that we started a hub in the enterprise centre in Portlaoise after receiving a grant from the then Government that rolled out the hubs scheme. Now, not only do we have a hub in Portlaoise, we have one in Mountmellick, Portarlington and Mountrath. Hubs were set up because broadband was of very poor quality in rural areas. To make the situation as near to perfect as we could we located hubs in designated centres, which really kicked off with the onset of Covid. I personally think hubs are very good.

I would like to see hubs being used more than people working from home. They would be travelling very short distances. It is a no-brainer. I want to be associated with the previous speakers in saying we have to give it another lift and go up another ratchet now. I do not think people realise even how European companies are looking at employing people and are looking towards Ireland. They have looked at our model because it is working. I can only talk truthfully about it. Where I saw it working first-hand was in my own local authority. People were starting to work one or two days a week at home. There was all the debate about coming back in and so on. I am going to say now what I said then. It can be part of our job as public representatives to be communicating maybe even five or six times a day with the one person in the one office. I found with the remote working that I was getting answers straight away for some reason. I said that publicly and that is the way it is. I have no problem saying it here today as well. It was not because people were not working when they were in the local authority offices or anything like that. It was just that whatever way, it suits the individuals. What I am saying is it is working very well.

There is this thing sneaking in now that maybe it is better that we come back into the workplace. We hear certain CEOs rolling this out. I think it is wrong. We should not go there. We should certainly stay the way we are going and see what happens at the end of it. I have to say that it suits everybody. I travel up here nearly all the time on public transport, as most people probably do. This morning it was 6.40 a.m. when I left. I often feel I would like to do a survey at the railway station to see how many people could work from home today and why they are not being allowed the opportunity to do so. You would have to be up at half five to be ready for the 6.40 a.m. train leaving Portlaoise. Surely there has to be 10% of 15% of these people who, with some effort on all sides, would be able to go to our local hubs in our county or work remotely from home. The biggest thing is for the witnesses to put it back on us. It is Government policy to roll this out, and to fund and promote it and support the likes of Ms Keogh and everybody else. That is just my opinion.

The Deputy has hit a few notes there. I see a lot of hands coming up to respond.

I was speaking to a former Minister last year and he also used the term "no-brainer". If it is such a no-brainer, why have we not done it? That is the question and we should stay with it. We are working with the Department of enterprise and the Department of rural and community development, and we would not exist without the WDC. Everybody in their own right is doing great work, we are just not bringing it together. It being a no-brainer is a good point. After that, the Deputy spoke about being at the train station. Back in 2017, before I ever set up Grow Remote, and this was the piece that brought me there, I went to the train station. I was working for somebody who was sponsoring a hub, so decided to try to fill the hub from the train station. I told people they did not have to go to work and they could work from the hub. People said a couple of different things. One said they liked the commute and did not want to be doing the kids' breakfast in the morning. That is fine. Others said they would be working remotely but their employer would not let them. That employer at the time was the organisation that was looking at supporting the hub. It is so disjointed and incoherent. That is the level of incoherence we are dealing with, in that the same organisation that was promoting remote work and hybrid work in hubs would culturally challenge people working from home. That is how we learned in Grow Remote that you need to go to the root of the issue, which is cultural and soft supports. That is how the training programme started. Equally, we learned that we can concentrate on those employers or on the already remote-first employers, which have the co-working stipends and the culture. As Deputy Currie said, they will have a halo effect on the Irish companies. We can choose to focus on hammering companies that do not want to do it, or working with those who already are, really championing that and spreading it. It is all leaning into what works already. We did go to the commuter areas and it is just not as simple as that. Training is the solution.

From the point of the Government and the public sector, there are some really good policies in certain Government Departments in terms of allowing people to work from home certain days of the week, hybrid work and all that. One of the things that has come up at the NESC meetings is the possibility, which has not really been explored fully, of public sector hubs with public sector workers from multiple Departments. There are privacy issues and so on around shared spaces. It is a way of getting around some of that. There would be huge potential for those, particularly in places like Portlaoise and parts of Kildare. We are sometimes obsessed with the western region. There are people travelling relatively short distances but it is taking them a very long time within the commuter belts of Dublin, Galway and Cork. That is one thing that could almost be an easy win. I have no doubt there are buildings that could be purposed for that, or parts of buildings or hubs.

On infrastructure, the reality is that there will remain elements of hybrid work in lots of organisations for very good reasons. People will need to be travelling to somewhere for a day or two a week or whatever, for shared days together. We desperately need better infrastructure to get people from rural regions into Dublin primarily but also Galway. That includes shorter train times, more frequent services. I will not go on about having the cup of tea on the train again.

I would like to ask the panel a question if I have enough time left. The response I hear from others is that it is fierce important to be working in the office because you are bouncing ideas off people and talking over the printing machine, photocopier or whatever. That is grand, I accept that, but surely for two days a week we do not have to be bouncing off each other at the photocopier or whatever. Surely we can try to encourage that. I would ask those who are in a position to allow this to happen to just try it and see the result of working from home. Has the work changed? Has it increased? What are the minuses and pluses? They should give it an opportunity. If we can change attitudes from that point of view, it could be great. I do not see the minuses in it. There are places it does not suit at all and we accept it cannot happen. In those areas where it can happen, there should be more of it.

I thank all our contributors this morning. This is a great discussion. I have been involved in it along with my colleagues over the last number of weeks. Remote working and flexible working are very important. The Financial Services Union, FSU, has completed a lot of work in this area and 90% of respondents have told them they value remote working. The fact that our pillar banks, two in the main, are recalling many of their workers back to work at present is a huge problem for us all. Deputy Aird was talking about those that should allow people back to work and so on. The biggest problem I see is that the State is calling so many people back to work at the moment. The Government should be leading on this as far as I am concerned. Even this morning it took me two and a half hours to get in to this meeting from County Kildare. That is regular for so many commuters, as Deputy Aird will know well. The commuters are being caught in traffic day in, day out.

Mr. Carolan spoke about the impact. I know we need to do more research but we had 1,300 respondents in a piece of research that we did on the impact on workers. What the employers are telling us is that remote working is not working to the extent that it worked in Covid or whatever. They are using that as a carrot or whatever else it might be to tell people they have to go back to work. I would love to hear what the Western Development Commission is saying on that. Most important is the current legislation, which provides that those who are in work at the moment have a right to ask.

It is simply not working. Do we need to change the legislation and put something in it to allow workers a right to remote and flexible work?

Ms Keogh knows my support for what she is doing. She talks about jobs versus capital investment. She talks about a lot of jobs and the no-brainer that she and Deputy Aird referred to today. What do we need to do for the no-brainer? If you can get somebody to work remotely and they are not stuck in the N7 car park every morning, that is the no-brainer.

I will refer back to the public sector hubs and my colleague, Dr. Aisling Moroney. That was discussed at that NESC meeting. That is not something new. That has been used in the UK but I would like to see more use of the hubs by the public sector, not just public sector-only hubs but also hubs that are there already. There are security concerns and all that type of thing but a lot of the technology can look after that now. People are using hotels, free Wi-Fi and all kinds of things like that so I would not be using that as an excuse for it. That is something we would like to see more of from the State.

In regard to the town centre first policy, there is an opportunity there to develop that idea a bit more. One other thing I cannot walk out of here today without mentioning is that there is an over-reliance in the very rural hubs on volunteering and the community employment, CE, schemes. Speaking to Senator Rabbitte's points, she talked about what we can do. That is something I would like to see looked at. A lot of hubs are being run by CE schemes, volunteers and community organisations, and I think there is an over-reliance on that, especially in the rural areas. I would like to see that looked at. That is my answer on that.

I thank the Deputy for his question. The fact that Government should be the leader in this is right at the heart of a lot of this. As a country we are leading in the area of digital services and doing really well but there is definitely a gap there. There is a digital divide where people are not able, for a variety of reasons, to access digital services. If you ever needed a real reason to focus on bringing services into our local communities, this is right up there.

As a person with an acquired mobility impairment, if there were no blended or remote working, I most definitely would not be here today. Working remotely enables a huge number of people to be present in the workforce. I noted an earlier debate with the committee on bringing more people with disabilities into the workforce. Again, it is a stellar reason for Government to support remote working.

Does Professor Whelan want to comment on that and then we will go to Ms Keogh?

To add to Dr. O'Brien's point, in regard to the legislation, in my role I am out with a lot of companies talking to them about what they want from our graduates and things like that. It is mostly information technology, IT, companies, it has to be said. They definitely make hybrid work work for them. They have a strategy and the employee negotiates with the employer. If I am a hybrid worker and working in the office two days a week, the work I do in those two days is different from the work I do from home. If I am in the office, I am chatting around a water cooler and in meetings. There is that type of social engagement and bouncing ideas off each other. That happens in the office. If I am working from home, it is very dedicated work. If I am a computer programmer, I am doing my code but it is very focused with not that many interruptions. Where I see it work is where there is some thought going into how I actually restructure my job so that if I am in the office and that is important, this is the type of work I am doing in the office. If I am working my remotely, I am still doing my job but working on different parts of it.

In regard to the legislation, I refer to having that right to restructure your job. I am not quite sure if that is the right phrase but something along those lines, where I can have some say in work and negotiate with my employer about breaking my job down into different roles that can be done, or certain days of the week. Maybe it might not be to that level but there should be some sort of negotiation to structure the job.

I thank Deputy Wall. I will try to speak to those three points because they are very pertinent points. The first one is in regard to the call back or return to the office. A lot of the discourse is coming from employers. A lot of the time they feel we are not collaborative enough online. What we find from our training programmes, etc., is that if you are not collaborative online, you are probably not very good at collaboration in person either. That points to this issue of the narrative and bringing people along the journey, that remote is something there are huge benefits to but only if it is done correctly.

That brings us on to the right to request in the legislation, and the Deputy is right about the right to request anything. It gives a lot of power to the employer. What we would say, and it goes back to Professor Whelan's point about restructuring from the employee side, is that it is a really case of, instead of penalising employers, incentivising them to have these remote work structures and to give their employees the flexibility they need to unlock the social and environmental impact. We would see, in general, that it is about giving employers support and bringing them along on the journey to see that they can maximise and unlock the benefits of remote if they have the structures and technologies in place as well.

On the final point about landing jobs, when we talk about those remote-first companies, and this goes back to a previous point, there is an American organisation called Doist that we work with quite a lot. It has 100 staff across 30 countries. It is fully remote with no meetings and 100% asynchronous, and it makes millions of dollars every year. That is because its structures are in place and it does it correctly. When we look at and speak about these jobs, the last 20 years and the halo effect of Irish tech companies landing here and bringing more with them, we would see something very similar with bringing these fully remote international companies to Ireland. Ireland has the infrastructure and the skilled workforce and it is about attracting them in, very much in the way the IDA targets foreign companies with foreign direct investment. That is how we would see that. It is joined-up thinking.

Does Deputy Wall have a closing remark?

No, I am fine, but I might come back in again if we have time at the end.

Does Senator Rabbitte want to as a supplementary question?

Yes. I want to pick up where I finished off with Dr. Byrne. Reference was made to living in Leinster and the hybrid between the home and the office. You would still have to live in the proximity of Leinster to be able to come in. I will say to Mr. Carolan that, in rural Ireland, we need to look at that in the context of living in Portumna and needing to be in Galway in a home hybrid. I know we are getting more hubs but I think we need to look at the style and the design of what a hub looks like. We talked about how Comworks is a good idea but, in regard to putting in hubs or creating spaces through our local authorities, while it is great and maybe you are getting the funding for doing up a derelict building, maybe that is because that building is owned by the local authority. Maybe we need to think more strategically about the sort of building we require. Is it accessible or is the remote hub working space upstairs and you do not have a lift? I refer to things like that. Portumna Courthouse does not have a lift. The remote working space is all upstairs and we spent €3.2 million. It was owned by the local authority and it was derelict. While it is welcome to have it back in use, maybe we have to look at strategy and be strategic in what we do in our development, and see where there are population opportunities for being in communities so that there is an infrastructure, as Ms Keogh spoke about.

Why am I saying that? I will go back again to the likes of Portumna, and I look at Clossick's on the corner. It is a three-storey building, it is sitting idle and it is for sale. I talk about the bank across the bridge in Limerick. You are an hour from Limerick, Athlone and Galway. That is strategy and it is about choosing the right location and keeping rural villages and town centres alive. I hear the Leinster piece and Dr. Moroney is right. We have to always look, and we have to look to Leinster because of volume and traffic, but when we look to rural Ireland as well, we also have a role to play in climate change. We are driving an hour down the road. We are actually stuck two hours in Galway, if you want to get into it. It is actually quicker to get to Dublin than to Galway some days. The witnesses might not believe it but it is, and definitely on a Friday evening.

Can we talk about what the Western Development Commission is looking at on the western side?

The reason the connected hubs are here are for those reasons. Many of those rural hubs are the ones that need our help most.

They have the potential - I am banging the drum about it - for increased labour force participation because the hubs are closer to people's communities. Our long-term vision in the rural areas is that these would become community hubs and community centres, not just for remote workers, SMEs and so on but that there would be wider community and societal benefits, like with volunteering and that type of thing. These hubs could be the centres that kind of thing evolves around. As to what we are doing on our side, we provide the platform but we also do a lot of work on what we call the hub community engagement. We run different programmes like learning in the hubs. It is a collaboration with the Technological University of the Shannon and is about providing third level education to the hubs. We are looking at a new iteration of that. That is bringing third level education out to rural areas.

On the design piece and all the rest of it, I was a local authority employee for many years so I understand repurposing buildings. We have completed some work with a design thinker who looks at hubs. When we started this project, there were not too many architectural firms you could approach to design a hub, so we are doing some work on that with a girl called Ainslie Peters who is qualified in that area. There are things that jump out. The buildings have to be accessible and all that type of thing.

On that point, what has happened with our local authorities is we have put the community space first and we have not put the remote or connected hub space first. We have to go back to the drawing board to ascertain what the priority is and then see how to knit that in. The courthouse in Portumna has one meeting room and four working spaces. The town is an hour from three large cities. We did not think through the whole process and that is what is missing. We have plenty of public spaces, and while you knit it into it, at the same time we are about job creation, attracting industry and giving people the opportunities to choose to live and work with proper infrastructure. The infrastructure is the high-speed broadband.

The local authorities are becoming more involved in hubs and recognising they are part of their local economic ecosystem, so that work is beginning to happen, but a lot more work is needed. Meeting rooms, breakout rooms and common areas are key to a successful hub, so they have to be laid out properly.

Under no circumstance should public money ever be spent providing a public space that is not accessible to people with mobility impairments. That is the very least. It should never happen because it is sending a message to people with mobility issues that they are not welcome there, and that is not what we should be about. It is disgraceful.

On the creation of communities around hubs and the vision, in some of the successful hubs we met through Grow Remote, the community of remote workers was created before the hub was built and that worked very successfully.

That is what happened in Loughrea.

There is precedent.

At the very beginning I was thinking the debate can head in a negative direction. When you look at the figures, by quarter 3 of 2025 there were 987,000 people working remotely and over 550,000 of them are usually working from home. Notably, since the Act of 2023 came into effect that July, the number of people working remotely at least some of the time has increased from 909,000 to 987,000. Sometimes I get the impression the Act, which, let us face it, can be improved and is going to be reviewed, is the be-all and end-all of where we are going with remote working. That is a distraction. It is part of it but it is certainly not all of it. It is potentially damaging to give the impression that, by giving the right to remote work, all of this goes away because we have to be focused on the supply of jobs to cater to demand. I have looked at the legislation Deputy Ward is proposing and he has sold it as a guarantee to remote work but it is not. It even says in the-----

Deputy Ward is not in the room.

Okay. I am referring to fact we have to be careful about saying there is one solution to this. There has to be an overall strategy. The UK has a day zero approach to remote work and a list of reasons it can be refused, and its numbers for remote work are similar to ours. We need to lean into this. We need to see the potential here and support employees and employers. The legislation is part of that, but if we are purely focused on a floor of rights, we are not looking at the big picture of all the strands that need to be done to ensure we are landing the jobs and offering people the choices and flexibility they need. There is so much more to this than just legislation. It is important but it needs an all-of-government approach to bring everyone with us to protect people and promote remote-first and hybrid jobs. What are the witnesses' thoughts on that?

A lot of the discourse about remote work in the media of late is not a question of either-or but of both-and. The current right to request legislation is commendable. We need to protect workers' rights and there is no doubt about that. To go back to the point, 1 million people in Ireland have flexible working arrangements. A 2024 Eurofound study suggested another 350,000 jobs here could be made more flexible, whether that is hybrid or remote, if the support and the willingness were there. Again, it is about the joined-up thinking and bringing both sides together. We need to protect employees' rights, but at the same time we cannot tell employers how to structure their businesses, especially when the realms of remote work are not going to work with certain sectors. It is about encouraging them and it is very much a case of incentivising, not penalising. So much of the discourse misses the point. We need a floor but there is so much more there to be done.

There is a cultural lag here, almost, between the old ways and the new ways. Some of the people who are making decisions and shouting about it are part of that. It can kind of work from or it can arise that people are thinking that they did their five days in the office so why do these people get something else. There can be an element of that, of course, so there is that cultural piece. The Deputy’s point is very well made. We need to look at it in an overall sense and try to shift the culture as much as possible because, at the moment, a lot of this is founded on a basis of full employment and being in what is kind of an employee’s market. An employee is, in a lot of sectors, in a very good position to look for remote work but we cannot assume that is going to remain the case. You have to build in some risk mitigation too. At the moment you might say the employees have the power, but that may not always be the case so we have to put in place legislation, cultural change and real promotion of this, with the public sector taking the lead on this so we are in a better position when other things shift, because as we all know change will keep coming.

With the design of hubs it is not even so important to do X and Y now but to have flexibility built in so you can change and shift as needs change and shift. It is an evolving situation with multiple moving parts but you have to get the foundational things right so we are in a good position to maintain the level of remote and hybrid work we have. Ideally, of course, we would increase but we cannot take that for granted either because, as I said, things change all the time and we are always in an evolving situation.

It is more back to the vision side of things and the education about what can be. There are a lot of very successful remote-first companies operating in Ireland.

They should be able to lead the way. That is an unexplored route for a lot of people. They just do not understand the difference in operating structures between our regular day-to-day versions and the remote-first ones.

I just want a full debate that does not just focus on parts. That is what we need.

To reply to Deputy Currie, Deputy Ward is not in the room. I am Deputy Wall.

Fair enough, Deputy Wall.

What Deputy Currie said is good. There should be a full debate and I totally agree with Dr. Moroney that we have to ensure the future and how we can grow remote first. That is what is being done.

I will make two points. I totally understand the point on disabilities and how people can work from home or a hub and it was remiss of me not to mention the importance of the hubs in this debate. Even from local, rural locations, many of the buildings I am involved with we can do more. I have raised this with the Minister for Social Protection and the Government has given a lot of money to this. Let me put that on the record too. Many schools are unfortunately being closed in rural areas at the moment. We hear about that day in and day out. They would be perfect locations for people to try to build those communities, and I am all for communities.

Going back to the debate on legislation, I was taken by what was said about restructuring the job. That has to be a conversation the employer and employee have to be involved in. That is where we need to go, but at the moment - and I get Dr. Moroney's point that it is an employee's market - the employer unfortunately has all the cards in saying "Yes" or "No". That is what we are finding, so there has to be a conversation and some kind of help for the employee. That is why we believe legislation needs to be changed or adapted.

In addition, the Government needs to lead in this. I am putting that on the record again. As the Cathaoirleach knows, I raised it with the Minister the last time he was here and I have raised it in the Chamber. We are hearing day in, day out from State employees that they are being called back into work, and they are already set up. They have already been working from home, so it is not that they have to change anything. It is already happening. I agree with what has been said. This is a great discussion. We need to be responsible in our debates and our debate is about the employee having a few more rights than just being able to request. That is where we are going. I look forward to debating it. I am sure Deputy Currie and I will have many more debates in the Chamber.

That is what it is all about. Does anyone want to comment on that?

Ms Keogh mentioned that the approach should be about incentivising. If it is legislation, companies will feel they are being forced to do it. Certainly, the companies I have been out with, which are tech companies rather than every type of company, are not being forced by employees to adopt a hybrid policy, where employees can negotiate their structure. They make it work for them. Instead of having a big office that hosts 200 people, they adopt hot-desking and shrink it to 100 people, so they are saving massive amounts of money in rent as well. There is a benefit for companies when they give employees the right to restructure their jobs.

Regarding the legislation, at the all-party group meeting we held in December, we looked at some comparable examples of remote work legislation in Europe. For example, in France and Portugal, there is probably more provision for employees, particularly when it comes to caring responsibilities and access issues, which could be a positive context for Ireland to follow. However, we need to enshrine those rights for workers and build on the big wins we have had with remote work over recent years. At the same time, it is about bringing employers along and bringing them to the table. For example, a lot of research is now starting to show that retention of staff is a lot higher in remote-first and hybrid companies than in others. If we can show the benefits to both sides, that is the way to bring them to the table and find the compromise we need.

Going back to the Irish Government leading on this with the Civil Service, remote work is not a panacea for everything. There is no doubt about that because nothing is, but it marks two key target areas, which are digitisation and green skills. Digitalisation, as we saw during Covid, makes the Irish economy a lot more resilient, particularly to external shocks. Second, with the green skills, there is an environmental impact. At Grow Remote, we would welcome the Civil Service leading on and allowing for it to make it the most digitised and green-friendly one in Europe.

Deputy Currie mentioned that the right to remote working, perhaps even the right to request it, and the national narrative when we talk about it could be detrimental. It is important to stay with that for a second. I set up a business and it is hard. I am also surrounded by lots of entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs. Our fear is that it is entrenching views. On Professor Whelan's point, no one likes to be forced into anything. This is entrenching the idea that it must be forced because people are clearly not seeing its value or they are not doing it right and so on. If we were looking at that with centralised supports, it would be something. When we tried to digitise businesses by bringing them online, we had grants through the local enterprise offices, LEOs, and all the structures and systems. There is nothing for companies. We are just hammering them. How will that have anything other than a rebound effect where they will not entertain the conversation at all and lock people into the office? It is potentially detrimental to what we need to achieve, which is everyone in Ireland having the same access to economic opportunity, no matter where they live so that we have the social, economic and environmental impacts associated with that.

I have stories of delivered impact and potential impact and it is a no-brainer in all these things so it is just about time we get going on it. Part of the work with the Department of enterprise was doing the letters of intent. There are two categories of companies, the international remote first companies and the Irish companies that are already remote. I spoke to Kinore Finance and Business Services, one of Ireland's largest remote-first companies, which is an amazing business in Donegal run by Larissa Feeney. Her biggest gap is skills training. There is no training. She would say there is no training in Donegal. The programme Grow Remote runs is free for companies and available nationwide. Without the pitch, it is because there is no centralised support that we are doing that in an ad hoc way. We are a non-profit organisation with a tiny team. That is not good enough. That is the problem when we talk about rights and hubs. It is the hard piece only; we are not engaging with what employers are dealing with. eBay, Autonomy and all those employers would say the same thing. In the same vein as we are talking about that, we need to talk about how to help companies to do it. It still will not be for every company and that is okay.

We are sort of dividing it up, because we are talking about hubs and the enterprise boards. I have one question about that and then I will ask a few more questions. I was involved in the initial stages when these all started up. We were getting grant aid from Enterprise Ireland for a hub manager. That has now been taken away. Can someone answer that? Why did that happen when we are trying to do all this?

I can talk loosely about it. It goes back to a point I made earlier about the over-reliance on volunteering and CE schemes in local rural hubs. In the enterprise hubs, the capital part of the building is funded and there is a programme for a manager, perhaps for three years, and then the funding runs out. That is how I understand it at the moment. It is not continued. The idea is that within the three years, the managers will have gone some way to making the role fully sustainable and that is not always possible. Three years is a short time. Those programmes need to be run over a longer period. That is my view.

It is short-sighted from the point of view of the great work Ms Keogh and others are doing on that side to try to promote it. The benefits can be seen if we could just get it to move a little more quickly. The witnesses are convinced beyond reasonable doubt that this will work into the future. Whoever is here in ten years will say what was being said ten years previously was a no-brainer and that it took a long time to get there, but that it is there now and working fantastically. Doing that is short-sighted. That is all I am saying.

How can rural and community hubs be strategically supported to act as focal points for equitable digital and economic transformation? Would Dr. O'Brien like to answer that?

I thank the Deputy. I will go back to his previous question about support in the hubs for a manager.

On support in the hubs for a manager, while I was doing interviews in the hubs I could see them with and without managers and hubs that had come to the end of their time with managers as well. Even the gteics are in the same position. It is extremely short-sighted to provide a capital infrastructure that is superb and then leave it a little afloat to rely on voluntary efforts. The manager in the hub is often the connector who oils it and makes the whole thing work together. They are the people with the centralised knowledge who can connect the different actors and they are invaluable. They are the ones who can connect the communities. For the equitable side of these hubs, it is looking at what could be. It goes back to my thoughts on bringing public sector workers in if they are not already in the hub, and there are quite a few of them in hubs. That area of interaction with local communities is really important. We saw a very nice example in Donegal of someone who was working with her local community. She was a public sector worker who had been working remotely for a long time but she could deliver her service directly to the people there. She was a trusted actor. She was local. There was that environmental impact - very low-level travel, the trust element and it was very focused on local need within the context of the local area. That is very much what I am talking about in relation to the opportunities there for hubs. We have been doing a follow-on piece of work in Galway on sustainable communities. It grew out of a conference. A local development CEO said that universities were not doing enough for the local regions – there was Mayo North East and Galway Rural Development. They said they did not see enough of the universities. We started talking about what we could do. That turned out to be a co-created course using a really novel methodology. This is something that we have worked through proof of concept with local communities, gteic, Belmullet, Achill, Headford, Mountbellew and Lacken. It is a very blended version, a little like the blended work idea. People come together in their community with the idea of creating a sustainable economic community locally. Again, we think about digital inclusion from the very beginning. Not all our community people are as digitally literate or would feel confident about going on a Zoom call or connecting. We bring people together in the hub, sit down and have a cup of tea and a chat and we all join together. People join remotely from different areas across our local communities and listen. It is based on a knowledge-exchange idea. The lecturer comes in, has given some pre-reading, delivers a little bit of work and then people workshop together. The idea coming out at the end of this is a community plan that will be sustainable. Mayo County Council has been very positive about how we can move forward and make the best use of what is already in the communities in the councils, which are already very active in the area of climate action and things like that. The whole point of it is to create our innovation villages in the areas, to land on that supported idea of something new.

How can existing rural community hubs be adapted or repurposed to align more closely with rural work practices including the need for privacy, traditional office space and sector-specific activity?

From what I have seen going across all those hubs, the needs have to be local-specific. If your local hub requires that there be a lot of privacy rooms for people to work together, that is what you need to deliver. That is why flexibility is so important. There are so many opportunities in hubs. As educators and in third level, we find that often people come into open days and ask what digital jobs or information systems are about. Even among people working on careers in schools, there is a lack of understanding as to what can be in the digital sector. There are loads of opportunities there for our hubs to connect with local schools and showcase what is there to see what could be. It is mainly about being local and flexible.

I would double down on Dr. O’Brien’s point. Often with hubs, people come to programmes around digitisation, for example, and will come to their local community where they might not go if it was provided in the county town. That is a key way to align with the point Deputy Aird made. The vision we have for rural hubs is that they would become that linkage in the local community and a place where people rally round. For example, climate action can be a very difficult subject for people. It can feel like it is beyond them or not for them. Their local hub can provide information and education on that and they can go there and understand it much more clearly, whereas it might be intimidating to go to a county town and a more formal meeting to be lectured about it.

How can the Government, agencies and employers collaborate more to ensure that remote jobs are actively created and sustained in rural Ireland?

I do social entrepreneurship, which always has a bias for action. We were in 120 communities and had no budget and no teams. We had volunteers for two years. Everyone here has made the point about the power of volunteers.

I want to echo the point about the impact of hubs. They have been instrumental for me, personally. We need to set a target and deliver a mechanism for that target. It would be contained in the current jobs target.

By "we", does Ms Keogh mean the Government?

Ireland, yes. The Department of enterprise is cathartic to speak to. It is doing amazing work on this but it is still disjointed. If I was to be brutally honest, it depends on who you speak to on any given day. That is not in the Department but there are so many different stakeholders we need to have to bring this together. The Department or Rural and Community Development is one and there is a focus on hubs. The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment was another. Until recently there was a focus on the right to request remote work. Then there are all the agencies and everyone else. We cannot be the one driving everybody being brought together around this target because that is not what will make it work. We need a target and a delivery mechanism. We know from what everyone has been doing what works. We would say we were "before Christ" because we were before Covid; we were not a bandwagon baby. We have all the relationships and all the structures but if we do not bring it together, we run the risk of losing an awful lot, as Dr. Moroney said earlier. It is not just losing where we are but going backwards. That is my fear at this point. I am going into a decade of this work still having the same conversations about why it will not work - collaboration - and why it will work. It is a no-brainer but there is nothing happening down the middle around bringing these jobs into Ireland. I ask for the committee's vocal, passionate, driven and focused support on setting a target and a delivery mechanism and we will do all we can to bring in the data from candidates and employers, the agencies and the training programmes. We are asking about remote work and still conflating that completely with hubs. Hubs are really important but the job we got on Inishturk, for instance, which kept the school open, did not involve a hub. We need to have a top-down view.

To be clear, we need a target and a delivery mechanism. We will do all the stuff but we need it to be co-ordinated with everybody working in the right direction.

Can I ask a very simple question? If somebody somewhere is interested and looking at Ireland, and if they think it is a good idea and they want to employ people to work remotely, assuming accommodation is available in that country and so on, who do they touch base with? Who do they ring?

They would not ring anybody because they would not care where they hire. It is a bit like revenue cash. The conversation I had about getting letters of intent was that I know the employer does not care where they hire but I would ask them what would make them care. They might tell me it is a training programme, financial incentives, community or introductions to employer records. I would say that is no problem and I will do all that.

We need to focus and pitch hard. We need to build a proposition that is designed-----

Who is "we"?

"We" is the collective, so all of the agencies and Departments, the WDC, the University of Galway-----

Who is the boss? Do not get me wrong, Ms Keogh is doing great work. I am not saying she is all over the place, but I am asking who-----

Nobody has ever accused me of that in my life.

Who is this person who is going to say they will sit down and when that phone call comes, they will say it?

It is great that we are getting to the meaty part of it. We are designing that delivery mechanism with the Department. Who does it------

We are back to the Department.

The Department of enterprise.

We have talked to all of the stakeholders about it, such as the agencies, the divisions and the WDC. It is a collective exercise of what we need to do, what we have already and what employers are asking for, what we need to get to and what a team of people would do Monday to Friday, nine to five. That is in development. I have been told it will happen within the year. I thought Grow Remote would achieve its mission within the first six months, back in 2018. I have been told that within the year we will have the target.

This time next year, the witnesses will be back here again and all this will be solved, and we will know exactly where we are going. Everybody will be happy.

That is on everybody to achieve.

I am trying to get to end of this note. I would like to go out happy from this meeting.

On the hubs perspective of it, we are doing a lot of work at the moment because we want occupancy in the hubs. One of the problems that was raised-----

I sort of understand the hubs.

Before an employer is going to base somebody in the hubs, they want to understand a little bit about them. The Deputy asked who they ring. In our case they ring the Connected Hubs team. We have a very small team, and my colleague Leah Fairman and others work really hard on trying to get the right fit for that company, SME or whatever it may be. A number of public agencies are also looking to base their people there, but we have a small team and it is a lot. There are places------

It is very difficult for them to wash their own face, to be fair. We might go back to my question and get to the end of that.

Could we perhaps call for a Minister to have responsibility for remote work and overall responsibility for a global remote working strategy?

It is our job to see whether we can get the Government to include this. At the moment, if we were to choose a representative, I would probably say it should be the Minister, Deputy Burke.

I disagree. I would suggest the Minister, Deputy Calleary.

We are not going to start-----

There is a conversation-----

That is what happens with politicians. Can we talk about that after? All I am saying is-----

Sorry, through the Chair-----

The Senator can wait until I am finished. All I wanted to do was just leave the meeting with something concrete. Now we will. If we can get this approved by Government, some Minister, he or she, will hold responsibility. We can then invite them into meetings when the witnesses are here.

On my own behalf, because I have kept very quiet as Chairman, allowing everybody else to speak, it was very important to have the three guests that we had here today because they come from three very different strands. That has opened our eyes to the opportunities, particularly in remote working. I was probably more uneducated this morning about the opportunities of remote working for Ireland. This certainly has opened my eyes to the opportunities and the untapped potential that is there. We will work with all the Ministers I mentioned earlier in trying to get that potential and that target and delivery mechanism Ms Keogh mentioned. It is very worthwhile. Certainly, it is something I had not really thought of. Hands up, I am a hub manager in my local community. We had a BCP first in the big connected hub, and I know at first hand the amount of voluntary effort that goes into opening the door and letting people in. I used to work for the health service, so I did it before work, and then I relied on the neighbour to call in and give them milk and a biscuit and keep them there and make sure their experience was enjoyable. We are from a very remote area, and we obviously got our hub because of the lack of broadband in the area. Now, as we roll out the national broadband plan, there is an opportunity for the hubs to expand more.

The support that Connected Hubs has given communities has been very worthwhile. The financial support from the Connected Hub grant was exceptional as well. It has brought communities together. It has brought together the social interaction and inclusion element of it, the well-being side of things. When broadband was available in our hub, the local active retirement group had different opportunities to do things they did not do before, the local farming organisation was able to come and help the farmers do their annual returns, and local kids were able to send things back to college, which they could not do at home. The positives that are there are overwhelming. The numbers might be quite small in the rural hubs but the impact has been significant.

There is a lot to take away from today. It has certainly been a very positive day for this committee to see the opportunities that are there to continue this. The response to the review that is ongoing with the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, for the right to request remote working outlines that there is significant interest in this market. We should all try to work collectively to make this a better system. I thank the witnesses for coming today and being part of this discussion. Are there any final comments?

It is a balanced contribution more than anything else when we are talking about where it should all sit. We have 400 connected hubs around the country, so straight away we have a basis. We have already invested through that Department. I see the commitment of the Department of community and rural affairs and the Minister, Deputy Calleary, and his predecessors. It is a natural fit for this.

The second last paragraph of Ms Keogh’s opening statement indicated that the organisation has fed back into the rural future strategy to ensure it is included.

I thank Mr. Carolan, Dr. Moroney, Dr. Byrne, Dr. O’Brien, Ms Keogh and Professor Whelan for coming in this morning. It was a very worthwhile conversation with a lot of food for thought for future conversations as well. As Deputy Aird said, we might see them all again next year and report on progress.