It was by chance I received an invitation to the Web Summit held last week in the RDS in Dublin. I had known Paddy Cosgrave’s father as a highly competent liquid milk producer in Wicklow so I followed his son’s progress with, I must admit, just a passing interest.

But Paddy’s Web Summit has taken the world by storm.

What is it in Ireland that a Wicklow farmer’s son at the age of 29 can become, with a few school friends, the world’s leading web show organiser?

While the focus was on websites of a bewildering scale offering everything from secure payment systems to finding specialised pieces of equipment, to providing access to all kinds of services, it wasn’t just about computers and web technology. No matter how rich you are, and some of these people were hugely rich, you still have to eat.

Paddy was determined to show off Irish food to what is probably one of the most sophisticated groups in the world.

He got in touch with Wexford woman Margaret Jeffares of Good Food Ireland and she organised, with Darina Allen of Ballymaloe, the feeding of about 10,000 people per day for the two days.

We have featured most of these artisan producers in the pages of the Irish Farmers Journal over the years, but when they were paraded onto the main stage in the RDS after their lunch on Thursday, they got a standing ovation from the assembled thousands.

This was the same Web Summit at which on Wednesday morning in Dublin, Taoiseach Enda Kenny sounded the bell for the opening of the Nasdaq Exchange in New York with the top brass of the exchange present.

The whole event made me proud to be Irish and proud to be a farmer in a country which has such a reputation based on the reality of producing excellent healthy nutritious food.

Nearer home, the internet has had profound effects on a number of industries, including newspapers.

We have been conscious of it in the Irish Farmers Journal and, for over 10 years, we have been putting our classifieds up online.

But the world is moving on and the internet is becoming all pervasive in people’s lives — it does not create information though it can process it incredibly powerfully.

Ultimately, individual newspapers will fail or prosper on the basis of their unique content and the worth of this content to their customers and readers.

Given the enthusiasm, openness, good humour and sheer brain power that Paddy Cosgrave and his team brought to the event in the RDS, it is no wonder that Google, Facebook and Intel have among many others all set up significant operations in Ireland.

There was also a whole series of speakers and various halls, one boy being just 13, who has already developed several apps while another was Elon Musk, who founded PayPal. An amazing event.