Ireland Invests $10 Million to Draw Remote Workers Away From Its Cities

When they say remote work, they mean it. Ireland’s government is spending $300,000 in Galway to set up high-speed internet across the region, including its offshore islands.

But adding these so-called Broadband Connection Points is just one small part of an ambitious five-year government project called Our Rural Future that wants to get the infrastructure in place to make remote work a reality.

The government last week announced it was investing $10.4 million in 117 remote working projects as part of its National Hub Network scheme — which includes Galway and a host of other regions.

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The media mostly picked up how idyllic pubs could be transformed into workplaces when the government published the policy in March. There’s clearly more to it than that. Projects will receive grants ranging from $12,000 to almost $300,000, with cash spent on aspects like building refits, privacy booths, control and security systems and modular offices, as well as upgrading audio, visual, networking and conferencing facilities up and down the country.

However, infrastructure is just the beginning of the journey.

Growing the Network

The first phase is focused on building a network of these workplace hubs, and internet points, to enhance and add capacity to remote working infrastructure in every region across Ireland.

The goal was to have 400 hubs in place, but a government spokesperson told Skift it’s already exceeded that target, with 408 currently mapped out.

Minister Heather Humphreys (left) promotes Connected Hubs in Swinford, County Mayo, Ireland. Picture: Julien Behal Photography

“Our Rural Future recognizes hubs as ideal locations for people to work remotely, as well as acting as key economic assets for towns and villages,” said Heather Humphreys, minister for rural and community development.

The spokesperson added that the funding news was well received, and there’s “significant interest from relevant stakeholders in the available funding streams.” But Ireland is a country with a complicated history, one resident pointed out.

“The Connected Hubs initiative is very welcome, especially when you consider that during the last financial crisis a lot of young people either emigrated abroad or moved from rural towns to bigger cities like Dublin,” said John Lee, co-founder of consultancy The Work From Anywhere Team, and based in Limerick, Ireland.

Ireland has favorable corporate tax rates in place to attract global technology companies, with the likes of Google and Apple basing European headquarters in Dublin’s Silicon Docks. But because of the financial crisis, Ireland has relatively high levels of personal income taxes — something that doesn’t really appeal to remote workers, and especially digital nomads.

“With the trend towards remote work, a share of the employees working in the large technology companies in Dublin are going to look to relocate to their home countries. Especially if the tax rate is lower there, which in most cases it will be,” Lee said.

“It’s going to be politically tricky to offer lower income tax digital nomad visas like you have in some other countries, such as Croatia and Aruba. Many of the countries offering these visas have a high share of their economy in tourism, whereas in Ireland it’s only around 6 percent. So there isn’t the same pressure to quickly implement digital nomad visas here,” he added.

One mobility expert described the policy as a stepping stone to attracting organisations, global talent and digital nomads to the country, but like Lee would expect a dedicated visa to boost those efforts.

“Individuals from outside the European Union will be limited to 90 days,” said Alex Felstead, co-founder and director of Global Mobility Executive. “If Ireland were to go down the route of offering a digital nomad visa, it would certainly be a big draw to organisations and the global talent pool, especially those in the technology space.”

Looking to Phase Two

Where Ireland differs from most countries is this push to first build a framework to make remote work a reality, and the government is already thinking of what comes next.

There are many aspects it will now consider, including catering to those “cohorts” or groups of remote workers that travel and work remotely together, spending months in different locations at a time. Then there’s the role of specific marketing campaigns to attract digital nomads, and collaboration with the hospitality sector.

A spokesperson told Skift that the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and the Western Development Commission, were considering these issues in the next phase of work.” The two bodies are also “engaged heavily” with the Irish not-for-profit initiative Grow Remote.

Grow Remote is in good company too, as plenty of other homegrown specialists make a splash not just in Ireland, but globally, including Meetingsbooker (which is powering American Express Global Business Travel’s own remote work bookings), virtual space-as-a-service platform meetingRoom.io and community website Remote Kontrol.

Lee predicts that eventually digital nomad visas could be combined with the rural redevelopment plans, and unleash a revitalized rural economy, regenerating many towns, or islands, that have been in decline for the past 40 years.

Sidenotes

Travel’s returning, but that doesn’t mean the number of webinars and online fireside chats are easing off. It could mean the opposite in fact, as companies thrash out ideas and work out their next steps. But two recent virtual debates suggest there may be a quick acceleration in business travel that goes beyond the usual sales meetings or networking events.

First up, training. And one Uber exec thinks it’s been lacking during the pandemic.

“The focus in the near term is that early stage collaboration, and trust-building training,” said Susan Anderson, global head of Uber for Business. She bemoaned the size factor with Zoom calls; you just can’t get access to that many people.

“For me personally, I’ve not met a lot of my teams, so I’m looking forward to taking that chance to go and meet, and spend time with, people in person,” she said during a Global Business Travel Association webinar on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, could we see vast volumes of travel return in the final quarter as employees finally get to meet each there? One serial entrepreneur seems to think so.

“The biggest issue of the last year and a half is the social distancing at work,” said Uri Levine, co-founder of traffic and navigation app Waze.

“We have new employees that we haven’t even met. We hired them over Zoom, and they started to work over Zoom, but they’re not part of the DNA of the organization, they’re not part of the culture.”

Of course meeting people can be done by video, but he believes people will join a company based on what they’ve been told; but they’ll leave based on the leadership.

“If you don’t have social interaction, the likelihood they would leave is much higher. Travel more to have those face-face meetings, to establish that relationship,” Levine said.

“Sometimes you look at travel expenses as the major expense. But no, the biggest expense is always people. Attrition is the most significant expense. The first thing we need to do after the pandemic is travel more to team meetings and into the office,” he added, during a TripActions fireside chat this week.

Based on these viewpoints, the corporate travel rebound could arrive a lot quicker than expected.

10-Second Corporate Travel Catch-Up

Who and what Skift has covered over the past week: Amadeus, American Express Global Business Travel, Hilton, JetBlue, Marriott, Pfizer, Ryanair, Sabre, Sonder, Wizz Air, Wyndham.

In Brief

Cisco Announces Its Own Hybrid Future

Cisco revealed on Thursday it had decided to allow staff choose how they work in the future, and was enabling a hybrid workforce, as well as transforming Hybrid Workspaces. It will also lean heavily on its own software, Webex, to do this. “Because we know that when we get teams right, we win. So we are going to leave it up to teams themselves to determine how they’ll work best in this new hybrid world,” said Francine Katsoudas, executive vice president and chief people, policy and purpose officer in a blog post on Thursday. “That means no set mandate from the top on numbers of days in — or out — of the office.”

More Adoption for IATA’s Travel Pass

Etihad is allowing passengers to use the International Air Transport Association’s Travel Pass digital health passport on routes to Europe, North America and Southeast Asia after a series of trials. Passengers can use the passport between Abu Dhabi and Bangkok, Barcelona, Geneva, Madrid, Milan, New York and Singapore. The airline was one of the first airlines globally to begin testing IATA Travel Pass in April 2021, and the news comes as more governments begin to reopen their borders to fully vaccinated people. Collins Aerospace has also teamed up with IATA Travel Pass, and will now integrate it into airlines’ passenger management systems using its TransAction solution.

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