Remote working discussed at Dáil committee on rural development

A Mullingar remote worker was used as an illustration of the potential of developing remote working opportunities at a recent Dáil discussion.

John Paul O’Shea, cathaoirleach of the Joint Committee on Social Protection, Rural and Community Development, introduced contributors from a number of stakeholders.

Two of those present were from Grow Remote, a voluntary organisation working to highlight the potential of remote working to revitalise towns and villages. It promotes opportunities presented by out of office work for employers, employees, and the communities in which they are based.

Its chair, Tracy Keogh, explained that remote work is a spectrum that goes all the way from nomadic gig work to structured hybrid.

She used an example from Westmeath to illustrate how Grow Remote facilitates access to employment: “Indra Cawley from Mullingar is a multilingual person and struggled to find remote roles to match her skill set in Mullingar because those jobs were in Dublin and Cork. Through our training programme, she moved into data analytics and secured a remote role with an international employer.”

Ms Keogh spoke of the potential to address regional imbalance: “Only when the various parts of the ecosystem – agencies, stakeholders and government – work together on landing jobs across Ireland will the infrastructure and investment to date bear fruit. We are shaping the next Our Rural Future strategy.

"We ask that remote employer engagement, community programmes and remote working as a skill be written into that strategy as a named delivery mechanism, with a target for jobs landed in regional places. The jobs are here. The people are here. The infrastructure is here. We need to connect them in a concerted, focused and systemic way.”