Does anyone come out well from the row over Web Summit’s relocation from Dublin to Lisbon? Yes, but it’s not who you think. Stick with me on this.
It’s been almost a month since the Summit’s co-founder and CEO Paddy Cosgrave made the announcement that the event would be moving to a more accommodating city in 2016 with better facilities, better venues and €1.3 million in financial support per year. According to Cosgrave, it wasn’t about the money.
“We chose Lisbon because of the strong infrastructure in the city, the amazing venue and the thriving start-up community,” he wrote on the Summit’s blog.
If anything, Cosgrave said he was willing to forsake any financial inducements to keep the Summit in Dublin so long as the city could scale to meet its needs.
Reaction split along two broad lines, both agreeing that it was a shame to lose an event worth an estimated €105 million to Dublin – by government estimates – but split along the lines of it being either a national disgrace or a savvy commercial decision. Here was Ireland, the tech capital of Europe, home to Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn etc losing the sector’s tentpole event. How could you not be outraged?
Last week’s selective e-mail dump by Cosgrave provided a fascinating insight into the collapse of relations that informed the Lisbon move. The disclosure, revealed before they entered the public domain under freedom of information, showed a back and forth between Cosgrave, assistant secretary general at the Department of the Taoiseach John Callinan, and private secretary to the Taoiseach Nick Reddy. The e-mails paint a picture of a dynamic company with grand ambitions stymied by political inertia or indifference. Where Cosgrave’s correspondence grew more detailed, the replies were almost dismissive in tone. Directness was met with evasion, calls for action for 2015 met with vague promises of ‘engagement’ for 2016. In the end the Department presumed too much and the Summit moved on.
So what was it all over? The Summit had a wish list of four points based on its experience at the RDS to date: transport for delegates, traffic management, pricing by local hotels, and venue Wi-Fi.
On traffic management issue was ‘let’s see how this year pans out’ and use that data for next year’s plan. The rest was silence. You have to wonder whether Cosgrave was talking to the right people. These aren’t issues that need four months to thrash out only to get a weak framework document. Direct questions require direct answers, not prevarication.
Point-by-point
It’s not that the Summit’s requests were even that hard to deal with. Taken in order it would have been easy to come to some arrangement with the Summit based on compromise. Where the Summit asked for free transport, additional public transport, more gardai on point duty and temporary public bike stations a simple ‘sure, if you pay for it’ would suffice. Where the Summit asked for street closures during social activities, garda escorts for VIPs and free use of public buildings, a straight ‘no’ shouldn’t be so hard to secure. Issues with venue Wi-Fi? Take it up with the venue. And as for hotels upping their prices for the week, maybe you should be on to Airbnb for a charm offensive. Disrupt the market and all that.
None of these answers would have proved popular at Summit HQ but at least they would have been direct and in the opinion of this writer correct. The Summit is a commercial enterprise of limited cultural importance to the city. The expected 30,000 attendees is the equivalent of a quiet night at the Aviva stadium. It doesn’t warrant the shutdown of streets for social events. On the other hand, it doesn’t need an expensive reinvention of traffic management as the expertise is already there. A one-page traffic plan for a part of town used to high profile events is not much to ask.
It seems nobody comes out of this well. The Dept of the Taoiseach was made look inept and official response by Minister for Transport & Tourism Paschal Donohoe on Morning Ireland last Friday was pure party line: government was supporting the Summit by spending €700,000 over the past five years in exchange for branding and stand space – basically what every other exhibitor does. Government was not participating in bi-lateral meetings with companies as per Downing Street, it has plenty of other avenues to attract FDI and is working them instead. So long, see you in 2019… maybe.
Cosgrave, however, has been criticised for an entitled attitude by demanding government interfere with free trade and shut down parts of the city. After all, he has a direct line to the Taoiseach. Right?
The winner in all this – albeit an unlikely one – is Dublin. The final document leaked by Cosgrave was a draft document from Dublin City Council from May this year. In it director of international relations Peter Finnegan takes ownership of the Summit’s issues, convening an Action Group to address its requests with input from Enterprise Ireland, IDA, Tourism Ireland, Failte Ireland, the Gardai, DAA, NTA and the Web Summit. Why and how Finnegan’s work was bounced to the Dept of the Taoiseach isn’t clear but clearly there was the will at city level to accommodate at least some of the Summit’s requests.
Also speaking on Morning Ireland Gina Quinn, chief executive of Dublin Chamber of Commerce, said the lack of long-term planning for the capital was leaving it underdeveloped in comparison to cities of comparable size. The implosion of the construction sector during the recession had left Dublin short on housing, office space and hotels. The absence of long-term planning for infrastructure, Quinn argued, demands the formation of a central mayoral office for the entire region akin to those in London and New York. An argument for a directly elected Mayor, maybe?
Losing the Dublin Web Summit is embarrassing but if it means getting a better Dublin to host more and larger events to a better standard, so be it. Stranger things have happened. Until then, we have a Web Summit-sized hole in the calendar.
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