Far East high-tech projects show digital hub to be poor relative

NET RESULTS: With the uncertainties facing the Campus Stadium Ireland project, many people are deeply concerned about the future of its sister project, the digital hub, which proposes to turn the Liberties area of Dublin into a digital media, research and business zone.

But many people couldn't care less about whether the thing happens at all. Many of those people are in senior positions in Government and across the Irish business world. This is a far more worrying situation to me than whether the difficulties at the stadium have a knock-on effect on the hub.

First, you might wonder what in the world the hub has to do with the sports complex at Abbotstown. That the hub is a related project is only due to managerial circumstance, rather than any natural similarity of purpose or intent. The same person, Mr Paddy Teahon, was placed in charge of both projects. He chose the same group, headed by Ms Laura Magahy of Magahy & Co, to provide "executive services" to each project.

Mr Teahon has had to step down from its executive chairmanship. Ms Magahy's role with the project is being reviewed. This raises concerns about the project. But the hub has occupied an ambiguous position ever since it was proposed by the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern. No one has really understood what it is about - not the people in the Liberties, not the technology sector, not the universities or research communities.

This is due to the lack of Government vision for or commitment to the project when it originated in the Taoiseach's department; the blinkered decision to link it managerially with the stadium project; and the inability of the hub project's management team, Digital Media Development Ltd (DMDL), to elevate the project in the public, corporate or research mind beyond a Dublin property redevelopment scheme with vaguely cultural overtones.

The Attorney General's report on the aquatic centre controversy throws up questions many have also been asking about the hub. What is this project's overall vision? What is its business model? Who is expected to use it or base themselves there?

I'd like to see those questions answered. But it is not just DMDL that needs to articulate answers, it is also the Government.

To understand why, take a look at two other places: Kuala Lumpur and Seoul. Both have well-developed plans for immense digital media districts, true high-tech cities that will make the proposals for the Liberties hub look trivial and, in the eyes of business leaders, irrelevant as they look for tomorrow's investment locations.

Seoul is transforming the vast area surrounding its World Cup stadium into the 6.6 million square metre Sangam-dong Digital Media City. The government is bringing terabit internet connections into the central business and research area - equal to a million, million bits per second, or more than four million times what we have here.

Even as plans were being drawn up in the past two years, work had begun to woo companies to the city. Construction is under way and the whole district is due for completion by 2010.

The development targets the same areas as Dublin's hub - digital media, film, software development, broadcasting, games and e-learning. There are government subsidies and an aggressive marketing campaign.

Kula Lumpur is also developing a huge digital district: a 50-kilometre by 10-kilometre high-tech corridor between the city and the airport is nearing completion this year. In the middle of the corridor is a digital city called Cyberjaya. Some 190 companies are expected to settle into the corridor, with 66 of them already in Cyberjaya, which has 10,000 residents.

Kuala Lumpur is offering major tax breaks to attract companies. The government has concentrated on laying fibre optic networks along all major roads, giving the region an impressive fibre ring.

Both projects are well-planned, highly integrated into the national fabric, and have been driven by national leaders who understand where their nation's future prosperity lies. So one might ask, where does all that leave the hub? I would argue that the real question is much larger: where does all that leave the Republic?

Much of the State's prosperity has been due to an economic engine fuelled by the information technology industry. With a few notable exceptions across Government, the State seems determined to blather about past achievements while failing to understand where our economic growth must come from in the future and the investment this will require.

The Republic is a tiny state that needs the visibility of such a project to keep its international profile high. But with such laughable levels of support and leadership for the project, the hub is doomed to be, at best, a pleasant cultural district rather than the galvanising investment and development force it should be.

As Iona chairman Dr Chris Horn noted recently, when contrasting the Seoul and Liberties hub projects for an audience: "If you were Bill Gates and thinking of where you wanted to put your next major investment, where would you go?"

The lack of national leadership for the hub - which signals a worrying dearth of courageous vision for the State's technology economy as a whole - threatens to let the Republic sink to a second- or third-tier location for future technology investment.

There is time to salvage and drive this project still. But not much.