Ireland’s housing crisis must be solved or else a generation of younger people will be lost in a 1980s-style emigration crisis, the head of Google Ireland has warned.
Speaking at the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, Vanessa Hartley urged the Government to invest money currently earmarked for the State’s “rainy day fund” into housing construction instead.
The State has two main funds where money is set aside for future use. These are the Future Ireland Fund and the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund. At the end of last year they held nearly €17 billion between them.
“I have young children. Honestly, they’re going to leave unless we have houses and jobs for them. It’s very simple. I see this all the time,” Hartley said.
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“Every single one of my friends are devastated to seeing their friends, their kids, leaving. We all see it. It is almost as bad as it was when my brothers all had to emigrate.”
Wanting billions to be spent now on housing, Hartley said the rainy day being prepared for by the Government has already arrived: “It’s a rainy day when we have people leaving. We’ve got to solve housing, we’ve got to make sure we do that.”
Ireland is now known internationally for infrastructure blockages, she added. “Ireland is the only place right now where we’re not developing our data centres. It’s the only country in Europe.
“That’s very stark. There are hundreds of billions going into data centres all over the world, and they’re going to be energy efficient because they have to be for regulation and compliance, which is the right thing to do.”
Ireland must “move past the planning and into the execution”, said the Google executive. “Ireland’s always been great at execution. We’ve got to stay focused on how to get things done quicker.”
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“Delivery is needed right now. Execution. Your reputation is built on execution, not on planning. We’ve got to have some really clear, discernible milestones delivered very, very quickly.”
Focusing on the many positives about Ireland, she told the summer school that Google’s operation in Ireland will be the fastest growing of all of the global company’s 120 businesses this year outside the United States.
“Ireland is the second-fastest growing country in the world for Google. And it is continuing to grow. It will grow the fastest in the world outside the US this year,” she said.
“It is because we understand how to get things done in Ireland. We vastly underestimate our business pragmatism. We vastly underestimate our productivity, and we vastly underestimate how extraordinarily agile our teams are.”
She praised the country’s stable political and economic climate.
“We have a stable Government. We have public-private partnership. People talk to each other. People try to get things done. Even if we can’t get things done, we talk to each other in a constructive way and in a way that actually continues to work.”
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Google has 1,400 engineers in Ireland working on research and innovation in its centre for excellence, while its Irish operation is also a global finance and regulatory hub.
