[Opinion Piece] Message to Ireland: get with broadband

Moriarty

The Sunday Times
January 23 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-528-1451895,00.html

Irish Outlook: Damien Kiberd: Message to Ireland: get with broadband

IT WOULD be unwise to give too much credence to the comments made by Nicholas Negroponte, the digital guru, on the collapse of Media Lab Europe (MLE), the flagship project of Dublin’s Digital Hub district. When Negroponte says the research work carried out at MLE was “more edgy” than projects being developed at its sister organisation in Massachusetts, all it means is that it was less linked to the needs of local business than it might be.

Although a taxpayers’ investment of €36m in MLE since its inception in 2000 sounds impressive, it is only a drop in the ocean compared with the R&D budgets of big companies.

Informed sources describe much of the work done at MLE recently as “very theoretical”. In retrospect, the timing of the project was also execrable, coinciding with the collapse of the dotcom boom five years ago.

Negroponte blames Irish and European business for their unwillingness to commit money to MLE. The reality is that many local IT companies were fire-fighting in the period from 2000 onwards, trying to adjust to new realities and generally disappointing starry-eyed investors.

The big players in the IT sector here, as Negroponte well knows, are American. We should perhaps respect their commercially driven decisions not to commit their funds to the MLE project.

Even at the eleventh hour, it appears the government was willing to produce more cash for MLE, provided a commercial focus was put in place and changes were made at board level to reflect the aim of linking work at the lab to Irish business.

The collapse of MLE has no implications for Ireland’s industrial sector. Much more serious is the stinging criticism made by the Institution of Engineers of Ireland (IEI) concerning our record in broadband roll-out, and the constant manufacturing job losses associated with the rapid rate of change in the technology sector.

Last week 220 highly paid jobs at SerCom Solutions disappeared; many of the firm’s customers had migrated to low-cost locations, and its original core business of computer -manual printing had been overtaken by the online supply of customer information and advice. In Lurgan, Co Armagh, another 200 IT jobs were switched to Mexico and Malaysia.

These losses will continue. In the meantime, our efforts to crawl up the manufacturing value chain will continue to be hampered by the failure to ensure rapid and comprehensive roll-out of broadband. Despite recent rhetoric from Eircom (“over 100,000 customers signed up and rising . . .”), the performance of our biggest telco in selling broadband has been dismal from a macroeconomic viewpoint.

Contrast our record with that of Northern Ireland. Last March, BT was awarded a contract to roll out broadband to every household and business by the end of 2005. By December, the number of broadband users in Northern Ireland had increased by more than 200% in 12 months, exceeding the 125,000 mark. It is on target to become the most wired region in Europe.

In the republic, our broadband penetration lags behind a number of east European states, including Hungary, while the technology is simply unavailable in many places, even in prosperous Dublin suburbs. Many of the government’s own initiatives on the information society appear moribund, so the best that we can hope for is that small, private-sector telcos using alternative technologies will somehow drive a quantum leap in broadband usage across the country.

The willingness of the Department of Education and Science to break up a recent €20m contract to install broadband in 4,000 schools and give it, in large measure, to smaller players reflects this changed reality.

It seems that too many people in high places have swallowed official rhetoric depicting Ireland as a world beater in IT. This seems to be based on nothing other than our status as the “second-biggest software exporter in the world”. As the Financial Times recently discovered, we are also top of the table in European chemical exports, but this does not make parts of Co Cork the equivalent of the Ruhr valley.

To buy into the overblown rhetoric concerning IT and chemicals is to allow the exigencies of transfer pricing to propel you to delusions of grandeur. It would be far better if we simply got the basics right, if we ensured full availability of broadband and if we addressed the rapidly declining standard of public education in our schools and colleges.

Public cash has been shovelled into the health services since 1997, but there has been no corresponding increase in investment in education. Routine declamations by politicians that we have “the most computerliterate young people in Europe” remain unsupported by any factual evidence.

Noel Dempsey, the communications minister, should perhaps study the names of the winners at last week’s Esat BT Young Scientist of the Year awards, and note the number who come from immigrant families. It seems many east European and Asian families are a lot more adept at ensuring their children achieve technical excellence in the physical sciences and in IT.

BlueShaun

On the note of scientists of the year.
I left secondary school in 1999 with a B2 in physics and chemistry at leaving (higher)
Without EVER having performed a single experiment.
How can there be a science culture in this country with investment like that.

thankfully despite the best efforts of my schooling, i`ve recieved an engineering degree, and just completed my masters woohoo....

End Rant