Ireland faces a generation of emigration unless it tackles its housing crisis, the Head of Google Ireland has warned.
While speaking at the 2026 MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Vanessa Hartley, the Head of Google Ireland, implored the Irish government to dip into its “rainy day fund” to help solve the housing issue.
“If we need to do a thing, let’s put money behind it and get it done,” Ms Hartley said.
“Housing, for me, feels like the most . . . I have young children. Honestly, they’re going to leave unless we have houses and jobs for them. It’s very simple. I see this all the time.
“Every single one of my friends are devastated to see their friends, their kids, leaving. We all see it. It is almost as bad as it was when my brothers all had to emigrate.”
Ms Hartley was speaking in the Highlands Hotel as part of a discussion, Ireland’s Economic Edge in a Fractured World, hosted by Jude Webber, the Ireland Correspondent of the Financial Times.
Last year, the Future Ireland Fund and the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund, held a combined total of €17 billion. These are funds which are set aside for “future use”.
However, Ms Hartley believes that the time is now.
We are actually in that state,” she said. “It’s a rainy day when we have people leaving. We’ve got to solve housing and we’ve got to make sure we do that.”
Ms Hartley said that Google employs around 6,000 people in Ireland, including 1,400 engineers who work in research and innovation.
She told attendees that a recent economic impact report estimated the company’s contribution to the Irish economy in 2025 alone to have been over €10 billion. The 6,000 people employed could be increased to almost 18,000 when “spill-over effects” are considered, she added.
“We are a centre of excellence for engineering,” Ms Hartley said. “It (Ireland) is the largest sales and operations site in the world for Google.”
The audience heard how Google has trained 300,000 businesses on digital in AI in every single county in Ireland. Local enterprise offices and Enterprise Ireland are all engaged with the firm.
Ms Hartley said that Ireland is now the second fastest growing country for Google, which has operations in 120 countries across the globe.
“The reason so many tech companies are here, notwithstanding the favourable financial situation in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, is because of how digitally literate Irish people are, how agile they are, about how they lean into new skills,” she said.
“Ireland will grow the fastest in the world outside the US. It is because we understand how to get things done in Ireland. We vastly underestimate our business pragmatism, productivity and how extraordinarily agile our people are.”
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She said a number of factors, including a stable government and public-private partnership, contribute to that.
She said: “People talk to each other. Even if we can’t get things done, we talk to each other in a constructive way and in a way that continues to work.”
However she warned that infrastructure is a “real issue” and added: “We are a huge part of the EU and we have to figure out how we can make Europe work effectively in a world that is constantly changing.”
Asked by Ms Webber if the infrastructure bottlenecks were so bad that Google may have to look elsewhere, Ms Hartley said that investment decisions are largely made on capabilities and skills.
“It does bring challenging conversations to the fore,” Ms Hartley warned. “It is something now that Ireland is known for, having infrastructure bottlenecks. Ireland is the only place right now where we are not developing our data centres. That is very stark. There are hundreds of billions going into data centres all over the world. They are going to be energy efficient because they have to be. We are not making those investments in Ireland.
“I understand that we are saying that things will get better with plans. We have to get beyond plans and into the execution. Ireland has always been great at execution. We have to stay focused on how to get things done quicker: show how you can take a planning application that used to take two years and get it done in 16 weeks.”
Ms Hartley pointed out that Ukraine is now “the most digitised government in the world now” and is also the “most AI-native government in the world” with all public services available through a digital card.
“When we have these conversations we are told: ‘Well, they kind of need to’,” she said. “But, don’t we all ‘kind of need to’? “Everything now is geoless and everything is borderless.”
Ms Hartley expressed the opinion that “re-skilling” would become “huge” and suggested that as part of its EU Presidency that Ireland could make a commitment to have every single person in Ireland AI proficient by 2028.
“Let’s let the technology companies based in Ireland lead on that,” she said. “Re-skilling is going to be absolutely key on AI.”
Earlier this week, some experimental AI models of OpenAI left a test environment and managed to hack into a different company’s real production systems while attempting to cheat a cybersecurity test. It was, said Open AI, “an unprecedented cyber incident” which happened when the company was testing how good some of its models are at hacking.
Ms Webber wondered how “scared” we should be.
However, Ms Hartley said that Google has launched an open safety controls framework, which is “a set of controls at a systems level to make sure that exact thing doesn’t happen.”
She added: “In the same way that we need AI regulated, we need controls around gen AI. We openly said that two weeks ago.”