The presentation is entitled "Creating an epicentre for the development of digital enterprise in Ireland". Some members of this committee have seen elements of this presentation before. We are located in the centre of the city, next door to St. James's Gate. We occupy about seven acres of land on both sides of Thomas Street and James's Street. It is a unique location as it an old marketplace and an area of great cultural heritage. There is a vibrant local community there and lately it has become culturally diverse as there are 50 nationalities living in that area of the city. There are about 20,000 people living there in total.
The committee members received a briefing paper in advance of this presentation and I hope they had a chance to look at it. We take our mandate from the Act which established the project in July 2003. There are many functions mandated to us under that Act. The slide in front of the members suggests that the core of the project is about the enterprise development of digital media and creating an innovative cluster of enterprises in one site. The success of that development has had a catalytic effect on urban regeneration by reaching out to all of the schools in Dublin 8 and beyond and developing new learning programmes that will help to breach the digital divide. It will prepare the people of the community for the enterprises that will literally be on their doorstep. We want to demystify the technology and make it easily accessible to them.
We also want to be the catalyst for the sector on a national level. It is an emerging sector which all analysts see as having great growth potential for the Irish economy. This is the digital decade, as Bill Gates once said. The enterprises are about the provision of products and services for a digitally connected market. We are trying to attract a representative sample of enterprises that operate right across the digital content value chain. That chain includes those who work in digital creation, management, delivery and those who consume digital products. The enterprise cluster itself is a significant attraction and a help to small indigenous companies. The networking and partnering opportunities that neighbouring companies offer for business development is quite significant and has proven to be very successful.
We also wish to create a test bed so that new products and services can be developed on site. For that to happen, we need to have a world-class telecommunications infrastructure and ours is one of the best in the country. We also need a community of people who can engage with those products and services and such people are connected to the project. We have excellent research projects on site. The location is in the city centre, which is an attraction in its own right. The project is backed by the Government, which is viewed very positively by the enterprises. We can bring a specific focus on digital media because that is what we are set up to do. The creative environment there makes for a very attractive buzz factor of which people wish to be part. There are significant social and community benefits, including the regeneration of an area that was allowed to run down somewhat in the final decades of the last century. The digital hub is addressing all of the important aspects of that regeneration such as enterprise learning, living, retail and cultural aspects.
The digital hub development board is attempting to address skills through a programme called the Diageo Liberties learning initiative, which offers significant opportunities for children at all levels in the education sector — primary, secondary and third level — to become familiar with the new digital tools and to allow them to develop and see the possibility of developing careers in this domain. We are focused on creating sustainable jobs in the knowledge economy that is now a reality for all, across the generations. We hope that by running an innovative project like this, we can develop programmes that will be a reference for other initiatives throughout the country.
With regard to our progress, the chairman, Mr. Burgess, and I have been with the project for just over two years, the period for which it has been operational. The board has refurbished a number of previously derelict buildings onsite, which now house some of the companies we have attracted. Committee members can look at the slide photographs of those buildings, which convey the diversity of the 49 companies we have managed to attract to date — companies located across the value chain to which I referred.
As we were present on the site and, of necessity, had to have the best telecommunications infrastructure possible to serve the companies, we saw the opportunity to extend that infrastructure into the local community and its 16 schools. With the assistance of Smart Telecom and Diageo, which I acknowledge, we have put broadband into all the local schools and the eight local community centres. It has been a great success and has been much used and appreciated by the teachers, students and citizens of Dublin 8.
We have a number of literacy programmes. While I will not go into all possible detail on these programmes, they are run under the umbrella of an overall programme known as the Diageo Liberties learning initiative. We are indebted to Diageo for its significant sponsorship. To date, the company has given us almost €3 million over a four-year period to run these programmes. School programmes are one example, such as the successful digital storytelling programme, whereby children are given tools such as cameras and allowed to create their own stories and publish them on a website, as well as engaging their parents and grandparents in that process.
In the community space, we have assisted in putting computer rooms into all of the social housing that exists in the area. All the flat complexes involved have a flat donated by Dublin City Council for computer use. We have managed to get hardware providers to donate computers and the board provides technical support and training programmes for the citizens of the flat complexes.
In the enterprise space, we are only now beginning to develop programmes. These programmes will specifically focus on the skills that the enterprises need university graduates to have as they seek to employ them. In particular, we focus on the computer gaming sector. We run a gaming competition which simulates a real commercial gaming environment. As a result, we send a winning Irish team to an international competition at the University of Abertay, Dundee. We began running that competition last year and this is its second year.
We do a significant amount of showcasing of products and services of the companies on the site and the developments taking place in the digital arena. This is of significant benefit to the companies because it allows them an opportunity to promote and exhibit their latest products and services.
The result we point to with some pride is that we have 49 operational companies with approximately 450 high quality employees — the knowledge workers that, as an economy, Ireland will want to focus on. A 2,000 strong community is connected to the hub though the community centres and the programmes with which we engage. In addition, we have already established connections to world-class research projects. Flexible office infrastructure is what we offer the companies, which means we can move flexibly as they grow on the strength of commercial contracts they may attract. If they seek to reduce in size due to the volatility of the industry, they will also need a flexible response on the building site.
Broadband is an area of great concern to the committee. In Dublin 8, the digital hub has a world-class broadband services infrastructure that is second to none. We are moving increasingly to establish connections with other cities and programmes similar to ours, to help in advancing the enterprise goals of the companies located at the hub. We have successful learning initiatives, which were acknowledged to have surpassed expectations by the Minister, Deputy Dempsey, in reply to a parliamentary question some weeks ago. We run over 20 programmes, in which 6,000 participants have engaged.
What is significantly different on the enterprise cluster side is that we have great strength in both foreign direct investment and indigenous enterprise. Indigenous enterprise is a matter of great concern that was raised in the enterprise strategy report, Ahead of the Curve: Ireland's Place in the Global Economy. Enterprise Ireland has recently reorganised to ensure that the indigenous enterprise that we successfully create in start-up can also achieve scale, and that we increasingly reduce our reliance on foreign direct investment in the coming decades. Foreign direct investment has served well but we must also ensure that we have a strong indigenous sector. Of the 49 companies in the digital hub, five resulted from foreign direct investment and 44 are indigenous companies.
For the future, we are, to use a saying, starting from the centre. We are starting from the fact that a seed cluster has been developed which is now 49 companies strong. We need to grow from that centre and spread in a concentric circle, to develop every element of the project in tandem so that, by the end of the decade — or by 2012, which is the real goal for the project — we will have developed from the 450 employees at the hub today to perhaps 2,500 to 3,000 employees working for perhaps 150 to 200 companies. However, this depends on the disposition of the cluster. The underlying premise of the project is that innovation and creativity, applied in this manner, will drive economic and social regeneration for an area that badly needs it.
