Home to the international headquarters of the biggest tech companies on the planet and a vibrant community of promising start-ups, Dublin needs to remind the world it wears Europe’s digital crown. But it has work to do first, writes John Kennedy.
My only reaction to the news that the Web Summit was leaving Dublin for Lisbon in 2016 was “so what?” That might sound cold but in the preceding weeks I had read the strategically leaked stories to newspapers and only a week previously noticed a social network teaser campaign asking whether the Summit should choose Dublin, Amsterdam or Lisbon, which I deemed inappropriate and in poor taste. So when it happened, I had already thought about it a lot and could only muster a “meh.”
Dublin’s tech ambitions existed long before there was any Web Summit and the loss of the three-day event will have no bearing on the city’s digital future. Tech is a 365-day-a-year business, Dublin has a tech pedigree that extends back to the 19th century, the industry employs hundreds of thousands of people who each in turn enable the employment of three more people in the wider economy. So get a grip, people.
