Ireland's govt IT: Recession and job cuts forced us to adapt Ireland was hit hard by the global financial crunch of 2007 and 2008. It was the first of the EU member states to slip into recession immediately following the bursting of the economic bubble. As the economy contracted, banks faced default and government debt increased, with Ireland eventually taking an €67.5bn loan from the …
I've worked extensively in a company that has a Linux product and needs to integrate into healthcare applications. You're living in a dream world if you think Linux is the answer to health IT systems... Application licences dwarf the cost of the Windows OS, and there's no way on earth those developers would deploy on Linux, a platform that, for all its other advantages, is only ever rolled out in institutions in order to reduce IT spending.
Meanwhile, other people living in a different dream world think the answer is iPads... a magnificent way of distributing infectious organisms around a hospital; a shit way of accessing clinical IT, without colossal expense on dedicated client apps (provided by exactly the same overpriced consultancy that recommended the ipads in the first place, of course...)
Not in the public sector at the moment, however in the private sector there are a huge amount of both established and start-up companies requiring skills across the IT board, in all sectors, a quick look at monster.ie will show you how many positions are available. I put my CV out on various recruitment sites at the weekend and have already been asked to attend 4 interviews.
On the down side property in Dublin is at a premium and rents very expensive
Most IT jobs are in Dublin, but Limerick is a sizeable enough city by Irish standards, so there should be opportunities, Shannon is a 15 minute drive from there, it is a "new town" and to be frank pretty boring, but the Airport is well served and the industrial zone around there has plenty of jobs going.
You are also within a fairly short drive of Cork, Kerry and Galway, and some of the beautiful Atlantic coast. chech out monster.ie eolas.ie and computerjobs.ie for vacancies
Moved from London to Cork about 5 years ok - massive number of IT/Developer/Support jobs for the size of the city. Alot of US infrastructure and security companies (Red Hat, McAfee/Intel,Dell/Quest, EMC, VMware, AWS, VCE, Solarwinds, Fire Eye, Simplivity. Sentienel, OpenText, Huawei, Tend Micro, Malwarebytes,eSentire) also some smaller Irish startups (CoreHR, Barricade).
Cork and the wider area is a great place to live and much cheaper than Dublin
It costs 45 Euros to see your GP in Ireland and 110 Euros to go to A&E. Car road tax is exorbitant and motor insurance really really expensive. Income tax is high and it is difficult to get pork pies and custard tarts. Plus there is not really any good ale. Oh and the ferry is expensive. Did I mention the current exchange rate?
Ireland has gone live with a national electronic referral system from primary care to hospitals.
And a patient can still wait 6-9 months to see a consultant after the initial GP referral, unless he has health insurance (which is a luxury an increasing amount of people can't afford).
You are reading El Reg, right?!
OK, so ICT is a little Euro/Public Sector speak and is what we used to refer to IT in the 1980s, but I thought that everyone knew that? Maybe as part of Ireland's modernisation programme, they could update their terminology ... or would that involve months of steering groups, focus groups and and committees?
“If you modernised in one area that released people, you had to move those people into other places,” says McCluggage. “The scale and capability to realise efficiencies was I believe constrained by that agreement.”
Pretty obvious, but that is the whole idea, to save jobs. Any idiot can save money in the short term by laying off staff - even someone named after a tartan suitcase should be able to understand that one.
It happens all the time in the private sector - it's called 'being made redundant'.
However, in the la-la land that is the public sector it's kinda hard to provide value to taxpayers when cost savings achieved through increased efficiency are negatived by having to shuffle your workforce around to please the unions, much like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Ireland's population and economy is not that much bigger than a larger city in the US -- a county such as Los Angeles County dwarfs it in population and economy. Since we're still shaped by historical boundaries we tend to lose perspective on the size and scope of national problems, so while its great to have developed and deployed an integrated IT infrastructure the problem itself isn't that much large than that faced by somewhere like Greater Manchester.
OK, so Ireland has an order of magnitude fewer people and (say) councils, but a meeting of 30 people will fail just the same as a meeting of 380. In fact sometimes it helps to have more scale because that prevents any attempts to agree consensus.
Complexity kills IT projects. Large budgets enable complexity. Therefore, the solution is smaller budgets which force simpler solutions.
See UC and NHS IT, for instance. Towers of Babel.
They talk about ICT in state bodies because it also encompasses telecommunication and digital broadcast technology.
State bodies tend to have much broader needs than a lot of companies have : things like vast numbers of distributed sites, secure comms for emergency services and police, state support of rural telecoms, regulation of telecoms, licencing of radio spectrum, aviation IT systems you name it.... It's a hugely broad area.
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