Last week, I went to the National Digital Week in Skibbereen. It is a remarkable community effort where the worth of high-speed broadband, good facilities for working and local determination can make an enormous difference to the prospects of a small town a long way from the Dublin centre of gravity.

The harnessing of goodwill from people who regard Skibbereen and its surrounding area as home, some of whom had gone on to make their mark on the world and national stage, was striking. The chief executive of Glen Dimplex, the largest heating company in the world as well as the new director general of RTÉ and senior executives from Google, all sit on the board with no remuneration. A local businessman has donated and equipped with state-of-the-art computer facilities, a full premises and the ESB, Vodafone and Siro had combined to set up a permanent fibre optic broadband network throughout the town. The businesses that have developed as a result are extraordinary. One had developed a thriving enterprise providing quality control information to firms with Freephone numbers all over the world. Most of those present had a very real connection with farming and it was refreshing to hear the speaker from the European Commission making the point that if farming and agriculture in an area were not economically viable, then we could forget about everything else to do with rural development.

There are close parallels between the rural electrification scheme of the middle years of the last century and the rollout of the broadband – except the essential attitude has changed. Rural electrification was seen as a necessary national effort to bring equal facilities to urban and rural Ireland. The national effort for broadband is much more hesitant with the commercial view that it is too expensive to link individual houses to a national network being the normal response.

The power of excellent connectivity was brought home to me when the farming session had outstanding vision and sound quality with two of the participants sitting in a room in New Zealand – they might as well have been in the hall.

I was struck by one of the New Zealand speakers, the head of agribusiness in KPMG, the large multinational accountancy firm. He described farming in the last 50 years as having been driven by chemistry and mechanisation, whereas for this 50 years, we are being driven by data and biology. When you include the whole area of food and health with increasingly individual’s genetic make-up being assessed when deciding on the most beneficial nutrition, you can see where he is coming from. The whole Skibbereen Digital Week experience was an eye-opener – full marks to all involved.