REMARKS by President McAleese at Breakfast with High-Tech Community Hosted by Governor Gilmore
REMARKS by President McAleese at Breakfast with High-Tech Community Hosted by Governor Gilmore in honour of the President
Tá áthas orm bheith anseo i bhur measc inniu agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl dibh as an chaoin-chuireadh.
I would like to express my appreciation to Governor Gilmore and the Secretary of Technology, Don Upson, for inviting me to meet with you this morning. I would like to thank the Governor for his kind words of welcome and to thank all of you for being here.
The Commonwealth of Virginia has many historic connections with Ireland, connections which my husband and I had much fun exploring on a memorable visit some five years ago. The extent and freshness of those links mystified and excited us then and it is a singular privilege to be here today to forge a fresh link, to make fresh new bonds of friendship in this new Millennium.
It was in the far distant 1730’s that the legendary Shenandoah Valley was settled by immigrants from Ireland and of course we take great pride in the fact that among Virginia’s founding fathers were people of Irish descent like Patrick Henry. In an unbroken chain since then, the story of Virginia is woven into the story of Ireland and the Irish. We need look no further than present company to Governor Gilmore and many others.
But contrary to the old popular image of the Irish and Ireland, my purpose in being here today is not to talk to you about history. As I crossed the Potomac this morning I was conscious that I was stepping from one world into another, from the buzzing political capital of this great country into the humming Digital Dominion.
We in Ireland have become very aware of the importance of Virginia as a centre of high-tech development. 60% of the world’s internet traffic passes through northern Virginia every day, giving it a claim to the title: ‘capital of cyberspace’.
Twenty-five years ago most of the land around Vienna, Virginia was undeveloped farmland. Over the same period, Ireland too has been transformed from an agricultural nation to an island at the forefront of technology. Much of that success can be traced to strategic decisions made in the 1960's and followed through since by successive Governments. In many ways the key decision was to invest heavily in education. And now, as we move into the Knowledge Economy, the benefits of that investment are coming to fruition.
The statistics are extraordinary. Expenditure on education has increased by 40% in the last 3 years and now accounts for 28% of public expenditure. Currently there are one million people in full time education with three out of every five school leavers going on to third level, the majority studying business, engineering and computer science. Very shortly, 37% of the labour force will have a third level qualification, and by 2001 the number of software graduates will have doubled from the 1997 figure.
We are also investing heavily in research and development, with over £2 billion having been earmarked by the Government for research in the fields of information and communication technologies and biotechnology. Of this £560 million is going to the new Technology Foresight Fund which will establish Ireland as a world class research location in Information and Communication Technologies and Biotechnology.
Ireland has been the fastest-growing economy in Europe in the 1990's. Unemployment, once a perennial of Ireland's economic scene, has been cut from 15% in 1994 to just under 5% today. Emigration, a feature of Irish life through many centuries, has disappeared. Last year there was net immigration - and most were returning former emigrants. Government debt has been dramatically reduced from 120% of GDP in the late 1980's to a very low 47% today.
History decreed that Ireland would for the most part miss out on the first industrial revolution but it is right at the forefront of the second, making inroads in the world of e-business which are already showing dividends and which hold great promise to vault the country into a new era of sustained economic growth. Indeed electronics generally account for over one third of Irish exports with almost one third of all PCs sold in Europe made in Ireland. Also, according to the OECD, Ireland recently surpassed the United States to become the biggest software exporting country in the world.
Achieving success in the e-business sector for Ireland was as important as Ireland entering the “electronics revolution” in the 1970’s. Companies looking to source their e-business operations have found that Ireland is prepared to offer effective and competitive solutions. During the last 12 months, key initiatives were taken at Government level to establish Ireland as the E-business hub of Europe and build the best competitive infrastructure to sustain this title. This has included entering into an agreement with Global Crossing for the construction of an undersea fibre-optic cable system linking companies in Ireland and internet users to the world. The cable, which is to be completed next month, will provide almost unlimited additional backbone capacity and state-of-the-art connectivity to the already world-class Irish telecommunications infrastructure.
Another sign of this building momentum was the agreement with MIT to establish MediaLab Europe in Ireland. This new independent research enterprise institute will specialize in cutting-edge technology focused on multimedia, Internet and e-business applications.
The Irish Government realises that it does not make sense to impose a straitjacket on development at a time when the technologies are very new and their social implications are only feebly understood. Two examples of this flexible approach are the recently published Electronic Commerce Bill and the Copyright Bill. The E-Commerce Bill proposes to create equivalence of treatment between electronic documents, contracts, writing and signatures and their paper based counterparts under Irish law and will be amongst the first of its kind in Europe and the world. The publication of the Copyright Bill provides Ireland with one of the most business friendly environments for the development and distribution of Intellectual Property.
Initiatives such as these are already paying dividends in the fast-changing world of e-business and the Internet. During the past few months, key American e-business leaders announced a series of investment decisions to develop their European e-business operations in Ireland, including companies such as AOL, Netscape, EMC, DoubleClick, Novell, Oracle, Dell Computers to name but a few.
We in Ireland have embraced modern telecommunications with a vengeance and there are a number of people in this room who have been instrumental in helping us to do so. It was a citizen of Virginia, Ron Coleman, who brought the first fibre-optic transatlantic cable into Ireland; it was another citizen of this Commonwealth and of Ireland, Brian Thompson, who chaired the Advisory Committee on Telecommunications, which helped revolutionise modern Irish telecommunications.
This, however, is only a beginning. I am aware that the Irish Government would like to develop closer relationship with Virginia. A Telecommunications Attaché will shortly be assigned to the Embassy, who will be devoting a great deal of attention to this side of the Potomac. A network has been established of Irish American high-tech professionals in this region and there are proposals to put some of this networking on a more formal footing. There are initiatives brewing in the academic sector with proposals to establish a broadband link between Irish universities and the universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Discussions are taking place on possible cooperation between University College Dublin and the University of Virginia in the sphere of electronic commerce. The Irish airline, Aer Lingus, has applied for permission to run a direct service from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to Ireland and is hopeful that it will be granted the rights.
All of these developments indicate that our relationship is entering a new, and more, intense phase. The historic links between Ireland and Virginia certainly are not resting on nostalgia. They are moving. They are dynamic and they are bringing benefits to both our peoples in this amazing age of technological miracles and borderless tools of communication.
I sincerely hope that Governor Gilmore will visit Ireland in the near future so that we will be able to reciprocate a little of the hospitality I have received during my visit here. I know that the Irish Government is keen to discuss a framework for a new partnership, perhaps along the lines of a high-tech Council involving business and universities in both Virginia and Ireland.
We look forward too, to further developing the already strong links of business and friendship between Ireland and Virginia in the years to come. We have much to learn from each other and to offer each other. The journey is just beginning.