In this column, I’d like to use the occasion of St Patrick’s Day to take stock and talk about where we might be heading in terms of our high-potential companies. I’m also going to talk a lot about the recent Stripe announcement and what it might mean for us.

St Patrick’s Day is the best day to think about Irishness, about our identities, and about migrations of all kinds. Fintan O’Toole wrote that Ireland’s culture “is not just marked, but actually defined, by the perpetual motion of the people who bear it”.  Usually, government ministers are heading away to love bomb the capitals of the world, things are turning green everywhere, including the tourists who hit the bars too hard the night before. It is a global celebration of Irishness, from the most plastic to the most heartfelt, and everything in between.

It is also important to note where we are as a country. This day last year saw us heading into a long lockdown. We were anxious and scared, but also aware that we were in this together, that as a society we’d cope with banana bread and Joe Wicks workouts and RTE educational telly teaching our children the long division we’d forgotten long ago.

A year later it feels very different, more fractured, more personal. We’ve seen some major changes, and it is important to note these.

All companies are risking their money and their time to answer the question put by them to the world through the hypothesis test.

In this year we’ve seen a rapid move towards mass sustainable mobility, particularly around walking and cycling and also rethinking public transit. We’ve seen a rapid transition to the virtual delivery of services like health and education. We’ve seen the state step in at speed, scope and scale to help millions of citizens through the crisis. We’ve seen an explosion of mental health issues associated with lockdown isolation, regressions in educational outcomes, and a decimation of the arts as a sector. Even ground-breaking digital exhibitions won’t change the long-lasting damage to the arts sector caused by the lockdowns we have seen.

In this year, we’ve also seen the same inequalities abound. Housing policy continues to lag behind every indicator we have. Our health inequalities have been clearly exposed. A simple example: German ICU beds per 1000 people is about 29. Ireland’s number is about 5 beds per 1000 people. An acceleration of many trends has taken place, from retail and commercial property to many task forces rethinking the future of urban and rural spaces around the world.

One big company, one cool story, but just one company

One other thing we’ve seen happening is a resurgence of high-potential Irish companies, and companies led by Irish people. This week Stripe’s founders, John and Patrick Collison, announced they had raised a Series H funding round, valuing their company at some $95 billion. They announced the creation of upwards of 1000 jobs over the next five years in Dublin and remotely. It’s important to note Stripe is also a founding partner of UL’s new Immersive Software Engineering degree, which I have the privilege to be co-director of. While I can’t therefore claim to be unbiased in my discussion of Stripe, I do think it is worth noting what Stripe’s announcement represents.

First, in terms of commercial property and the future of the city, Stripe’s is the first announcement of new tech jobs on a scale of thousands in Dublin since Google pulled out of the Sorting Office deal. This decision will act as a very strong signal for other firms and other investors. Secondly, one of the key investors in this series H round for Stripe is the Irish state itself, showing there’s a willingness to back a company of this scale by the state. I hope we see many such investments into the future.

Third, it is important to note that despite the founders’ nationality, Stripe is a US company. This is the first major announcement of this sort since the Biden election and shows that despite Treasury Secretary Yellen’s commitment to the OECD digital taxation process, a company like Stripe still decided with full knowledge of the likely changes to that digital taxation regime that it would be beneficial for them to locate more of their activity in Ireland.

The jobs Stripe, and companies like Stripe, will create are some of the best paid, most interesting jobs existing in the economy. As innovative and interesting as it is, Stripe is just one company. There are many more like Stripe. I have met some of the best recently, from Provisio to SoapBox Labs to Viotas to Fenergo to Manna Aero to Payslip and many, many more.

They all have some version of the same two questions to answer. First question: these companies need really bright, qualified people, where will they come from? Second question: where will the ideas they implement come from?

Let’s take the second question first.

“Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes”-Napoleon Hill

The 21st Century will be dominated by countries and companies which can bring the best people and their ideas together to execute on these ideas. All a company is, at its heart, is a hypothesis test about the world. Hypothesis testing is a formal process of investigating a statement to either accept or reject it. Stripe is a hypothesis test of some version of the following statement: If payment systems are simplified, the task of taking payments over the internet will be simplified, then companies will conduct more business over the internet than companies who do not have a simplified payment system. As a result, the GDP of the internet will rise. It goes without saying that as the GDP of the internet rises, so do Stripe’s fortunes.

The world has accepted this statement. The formal process they are following is, basically, capitalism. All companies are risking their money and their time to answer the question put by them to the world through the hypothesis test.

The Immersive Software Engineering course at UL is really an attempt to think of ways companies can speak more directly to students

A good question to ask, then, is how we can create a world where more people can test more hypotheses. Some of this is a question of landscape.

Some ideas come pre-packaged from the world in a flash of inspiration. Most do not. Some are eked out of painstaking research and development. Consider the R&D landscape in Ireland. In terms of R&D intensity, Ireland ranks 19th out of 28. Our Digital Economy and Society score ranks us 7 out of 28. In terms of researchers per million of the population, Ireland ranks 13th out of 28. Ireland’s patent application rate per billion of GDP is 1.8, the EU average is 3.3.

Top Irish researchers tend to outperform – our top cited reseach in the most cited publications rate is 12 per cent, while the EU average is 11.1 per cent. So, while there are pockets of genuine excellence, the overall story is fair to middling in terms of our system-wide performance. This exposes a huge opportunity for Ireland. Improving the landscape that defines the generation of ideas by even 10 per cent or 20 per cent would be transformative.

Wherever ideas come from, having an idea is nothing without having the ability for it to make an impact in the world. This often happens through companies. In terms of the Ease of Doing Business Rank, Ireland ranks 23rd out of 190 in the world. Even better, Ireland’s knowledge intensive employment score as a percentage of employment is 41 per cent, while the EU average is 36 per cent. So, when we have really good ideas, we can turn those ideas into companies and working hypothesis tests. That’s a real strength we can build upon.

A better landscape to turn ideas into reality is exactly what will ensure Ireland progresses in the 21st Century.

Finding smart people

Then there’s the first problem. Where do you get smart people to turn your ideas into reality? Sometimes these people are walking the streets looking for work. Sometimes you train them up. More often you have to fight to recruit them. Ensuring a supply of talented, experienced people for business to use as they saw fit has never, ever been the role of the higher and further education sector.

It is often seen that way, and often our university and IoT leaders have made it sound that way to shake the biscuit tin for the Minister for Education of the day, but that really is not what education is for. Education is all about learning how to ask interesting questions, some of which get turned into ideas worth sharing, some of which turn into companies, and some of which, perhaps most of which, go absolutely nowhere.

That’s because of the work of generations of people who looked out, went out, and came back. Which is, in a way, the story of Ireland.

The Immersive Software Engineering course at UL is really an attempt to think of ways companies can speak more directly to students and for students to have a more hands-on experience in companies throughout their degree.

That kind of ongoing, shared dialogue doesn’t happen as much as it should, in my view, in higher and further education. Immersive Software Engineering is just a hypothesis test. It might be that the world says yes to it. It might be that the world says no to it. This is not a plea for a takeover of education by business, or even of computer science. It’s not for everyone, and not designed to be. It’s just an experiment, and we’ll see how it goes. I do think we need to see many more experiments in higher and further education though. Loads of them.

The more the better. We need to be, and to be seen to be, innovating around the structures of higher and further education. We don’t always need to do new things with business, they don’t always need to do new things with us. But where it makes sense to intersect, we should not be afraid of trying new things.

A perfect example is the Patch programme run by Tom McCarthy, Sarah Baker, and Andrea Vaccari and DogPatch Labs. Patch is a summer programme for people interested in building new things. Part test bed, part incubator, part nerd camp for very smart young people, the ideas it will generate are going to make a big dent in the world. And Patch has nothing to do with the university sector. Like Stripe, Patch is an experiment in trying new things. We should celebrate it.

I could give many other examples like Patch. Ireland in 2021 is teeming with them. The optimism and the opportunity really is there in a way it was not in the last generation, or the one that came before it.

On that note, I’d like to reflect on where we are, and what we have achieved. We live in a time when the state is wealthy enough and broad-based enough to pay over a fifth of its citizens, where the life expectancy of the average Irish person is rising rapidly, where our health systems have proven adequate to the challenge of a global pandemic, where universal education is the norm, where people raised within our education system can leave these shores, make something new, and bring back jobs and investment to the country. It’s not a bad place to be. Contrast where we are today with the sentiments expressed in the greatest poem about emigration, written by the late, great Eavan Boland. The Emigrant Irish ends with these haunting lines. 

Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering

In the bruise-coloured dusk of the New World.

And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.

Ireland is not a paradise, and it has major problems it needs to fix. But for all that, it is inarguable the Irish migrant experience is utterly different on this St Patrick’s Day from the experience of the people Boland wrote so movingly about. That’s because of the work of generations of people who looked out, went out, and came back. Which is, in a way, the story of Ireland.