From beyond the Pale: In praise of unsung Irish tech success stories

But if you get out and actually talk to people building home-grown companies or expanding international ones here, it’s a lot more diverse.

At the Transport Research Arena conference last week, an event focused mainly on cars, boats, trains and planes, there was a healthy reminder of just how many Irish companies are doing fairly core engineering work in some relatively cutting-edge tech activities.

Like Barry Lunn’s Provizio, a category-leading car-tech startup in Limerick that is pushing the boundaries of radar-assisted tech for self-driving vehicles.

Or Tuam-based Valeo, which makes and designs cameras for a huge chunk of the big car firms, such as BMW. Although Valeo is a French company now, the Galway-based firm started out as Connaught Electronics in 1982.

It designed and made alarms for trucks, later expanding into cameras and other electronics and was in competition with Valeo for a big contract, beating out the French firm.

Irish tech firm Stripe is graduating other Irish executives to lead parts in cutting-edge multinationals

So Valeo bought Connaught Electronics and has grown its Tuam base from around 250 people to something approaching 1,000 today. Almost half of its Galway workforce is research and development into camera technology. The IP here, all Valeo’s, is basically a Galway phenomenon.

That Irish-designed, Irish-manufactured tech from Valeo almost certainly ends up in some of the same mainstream cars as components designed and made by Mergon, a 40-year-old Westmeath-based firm that specialises in moulding for car manufacturers and other industrial companies.

is graduating other Irish executives to lead parts in cutting-edge multinationals

And there’s a lot more happening that doesn’t really sneak into news narratives around the tech industry.

The sector is still considered to mostly be a Dublin-based affair; but 54pc of the multinational jobs are outside Dublin, according to IDA CEO, Michael Lohan, who also spoke at the TRA conference.

Quite a lot of the newcomers are at the higher end of the spectrum, too. Last week, I shared a speaking panel with Emma Redmond, OpenAI’s assistant general counsel for privacy and data protection. Her job, in part, is to lead and build a team that can steer the world’s most talked-about tech company within an EU that now sets the tone for the world’s regulatory standards.

Irish companies are doing fairly core engineering work in some relatively cutting-edge tech activities

Redmond is a good example of a new breed of global Irish power executive; she was previously Stripe’s chief privacy officer and global head of data protection.

Or, to put it another way, Stripe, a tech giant described as jointly Irish headquartered by its two Irish founders (the Collison brothers), is graduating other Irish executives to lead parts in cutting-edge multinationals such as OpenAI.

Software startups and Google staff in Dublin’s inner city are still a big, maybe even dominant, part of Ireland’s tech economy. But there’s quite a lot going on outside the Pale and outside the usual news narratives.

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Does it matter whether the CEO of a news organisation holds political views one way or the other?

In the American broadcaster National Public Radio, former Web Summit CEO Katherine Maher has become the new favourite punchbag of the American political right.

From Fox News to Elon Musk, Maher has been repeatedly under attack for her left-wing political views, aired over the years in tweets and in a ‘Ted Talk’.

The row, which kicked off when an editor was suspended for criticising NPR’s lack of political diversity, has now transmogrified into something ugly and hysterical, with thousands of online personalised comments directed at Maher.

The blow-up has even attracted a handful of respected figures, such as former Y-Combinator boss Paul Graham, to become part of the baying mob.

Uncharacteristically, Graham quoted part of Maher’s remarks around the meaning of truth to apparently further feed a pile-on onto Maher.

The genesis of the ‘scandal’ is that Maher holds left-wing political views while being the CEO and president of NPR, which receives a small percentage of its funding from the state (1pc directly and about 10pc from other state-backed sources).

Does that mean that she cannot effectively, fairly lead a news-based organisation? It’s pretty naive to argue that the two are mutually exclusive; I’ve yet to meet someone in a news organisation who doesn’t have fairly strong political views on at least a handful of issues.

And it’s fair to suppose that some of that bleeds into topic and story selections, as the difference between Fox News and CNN, or the Guardian and the Telegraph, obviously attests.

But is having left-wing views enough to get you banned from working in news? Might it only be right-wing views that are considered “fair and balanced”? We shall see in the coming days.