 So I think it's incredibly fitting that we have this seminar here in Dublin and we're incredibly excited to be hosting it. As I say, from our perspective, Ireland is a destination for really thinking differently about how to solve some of the biggest challenges and take on the biggest opportunities that actually an ever-increasing digital world brings. It just makes it an incredibly exciting, exciting place for us to work and partner with all of our clients here in Ireland, so we're very excited about this. From Estonia and from Norway too, for your support of this event, which is co-hosted with the IIEA. Today's event is really very timely. I think we couldn't have planned it better, I think, if we were doing it any other time. For two reasons. One, it's very topical here, but also because the Estonian government has taken over the presidency, as you know, and they've seen the digital single market as one of its priorities. And also, I think, when we have Brexit and all that's going on there, that one of the areas we really need to look at is how we can cooperate on digital matters across Europe. As you can see, we've got a tremendous stellar scent of speakers here today who will cover a wide range of issues. The digital single market, as you know, is very broad, but today we're going to cover the Irish perspective. Barry Larry, the Chief Information Officer, will give us the Irish perspective. I'm going to give Johan La Passeur-Chef de Cabernet to Commissioner Andrews Ansel, who's the Digital Commissioner for the Digital Single Market. Paul Caffey will look at the Nordic and Baltic cooperation and digital policy. And Simthukut will look at the view from the Estonian presidency. So we have a broad range of speakers covering a wide range of topics from their own perspective. But it gives me great pleasure to introduce our first speaker, who is Barry Larry. A lot of you will know him. He's the CIO for the Irish government. He's been in this position now since 2016. And Barry's main role is to look at public service ICT strategy and set out our ambitions for developing the use of shared services, digital services and data for the better use of Ireland, but also for the citizens of Ireland. Barry has a very distinguished career, has been involved in this area for over 30 years. Prior to this, he was the Director of IT Shared Services and Strategy in Northern Ireland and head of the professional bodies within Northern Ireland Civil Service. And he has been awarded in 2011, chosen the Northern Ireland IT Professional of the Year. So I'm the warm-up back today for the three esteemed gentlemen on my left. And what I'm going to do is just to provide a little bit of context about the challenge specifically for Ireland with regards to the digital single market and the government action plan. I'll talk very briefly, because it's the contextual talk about the digital single market itself. Then I'll talk about High Ireland's preparing for it. And then finally, will it work? A perspective on that. So what is the digital single market? Well, John's boss here, Andrew Samsip, speaks very eloquently about the vision for the digital single market and the value that it will add to the European economy in terms of job and wealth creation. And one of the key barriers he says many times to that is the fragmentation that we currently face across Europe. So this idea of having common policies and coordination across Europe can only be good for not just better European government, because he governments a part of the whole agenda, but better commerce, better business across Europe. The digital single market plan has 16 initiatives of various degrees of complexity and difficulty and ambition. And some of my colleagues in the room are here who are involved in various parts of this. I guess my two priorities are the two at the bottom, which focus very much on the government, but also in some of what's called the European interoperability framework. Some of the very critical aspects of the digital single market and the government action plan ambitions rely on this ability to have a technical foundation for being able to link up persons and businesses, businesses and businesses, businesses and governments, persons and government across Europe. So they're the two areas that I'm particularly involved in, but there's a whole range of things, which I'm sure you'll talk about later on, which encompass this wider agenda. The actual European interoperability framework itself has 47 recommendations and they cover a broad area from things like maritime radio right the way through to some of the standards around technology that I'm specifically involved with. And then we have the government action plan itself, which has 20 specific challenges or goals and objectives listed in that. So as you can see, even in the area we're talking about today, there's a vast complexity of work and a vast volume of work that needs to be done. So what are we specifically trying to do on it? Well, this is our e-government minister, Patrick O'Donovan, and I guess it was a very good start when the current government or the previous government, if we're being exact, when they came to power in 2016, they realised the importance of an e-government minister to the Irish agenda, I guess, not just nationally but across Europe. And the other thing I should say is the current government also has a minister with specific responsibilities for GDPR and we were the first member state to do that. So in terms of ambition, Ireland and the Irish government is very much at the forefront of thinking in this area and trying to actually find and ensure that Ireland can be well aligned to some of the very forward thinking that's taken place in terms of the e-government agenda and the DSM agenda across Europe. The minister in July formally published the e-government strategy and what we did with the e-government strategy was we very carefully looked at what was happening in Europe and we spoke to our colleagues in other countries and we really tried to come up with a priority list of what we needed to do in e-government to play our part in keeping this whole agenda moving forward. And they're listed there but the key ones I guess were digital services gateway because some of the ideas behind the e-government action plan are that if you're a citizen who lives in Germany and you happen to own a holiday home in Ireland you're first of all a very lucky person but secondly you should be able to pay your property tax just as easily as someone in Ireland can and likewise if you're an Irish person and you happen to work in Spain or France or whatever you should be able to do business with your government as easily as someone who's still resident in the state can do and of course in order to do that not just do we need a gateway, a mechanism to move across boundaries but we also need a form of electronic ID, a form of absolute assurance that when I'm in Spain and I tell the government this is Barry Laurie here wanting to perform an activity the state can be absolutely certain that it actually is that person who's at the other end of the line. There's other things there I won't go through them all but obviously we need to do the same for businesses and locations we talk about the importance of enhancing our capability for data sharing there's legislative impacts to this, there's open data impacts there's actually tidying up the infrastructure in the back end because one of the important things of what we're doing is to actually make it much more simple and much more secure and we're doing work in infrastructure to do that and obviously governance and skilling is a key part of that so I just want to very quickly touch on some of the key things that relate most closely to the debate today so this is our digital services gateway it will be formally launched by the minister within the next few weeks the interesting thing about this is the simplicity of it and the reason why it is very simple is because we went out to a consultation on this and we spoke to groups like the National Disability Authority and so on and the message that came back very strongly was people want simplicity when they do business with government so they don't want the bells and whistles that some of these commercial websites have because it's all about being attractive to the eye and come to us they want simplicity because you have to use it they love the insurance of the harp and the Gov.ie so we basically listened to all these views in the design of this gateway the second thing, my Gov ID and this was actually taken just about the end of March and it was a formal launch the two shock who was then the minister for DSP and my own minister Pascal Donahue launched my Gov. ID and the ambition behind that launch then was to very much start the narrative around why do we need this, why is it so important to use this to go forward and those of you who've tracked the debate in the last week will have heard people publicly say it's not a good thing for government to be joining up citizens data it concerns citizens when this happened the flip side of that of course is as several ministers have said this week it is impossible for Ireland to modernise and progress as a country to be a key player of what's happening in Europe and beyond if we don't take these steps because at the end of the day one of the things you'll read in all your papers is that post Brexit Ireland wants to be a place where young people want to stay it wants to be a place where other people want to come and work and use that diversity that will not happen if we're a place that isn't seen to be a modern go ahead place to live in and part of that of course is all the beauty and so on that you can see outside but part of that is a government that is modern that thinks ahead that thinks in a very modern way that wants to be a great country where you can do business simply whether with government and as simply as with retail banks and so on so thankfully this is a road that there's no intention from government that it's going to pull back from it very much recognises that we have to pursue this path that we have to simplify and modernise our government and this is a very key part of it the data sharing and governance bill then is obviously a key part of the legislative underpinnings of what we're doing so the Magov ID and the public service card is already taken care of in legislation but obviously what we want to do is we not only want to encourage state bodies to share information but if we're going to move to the point of tell us once and we'll use many times which is one of the key European principles we've almost got to blige state bodies to think differently about how they use data so the data sharing and governance bill will not only give us the legal underpinnings for sharing data it will also give the minister the right to demand more sharing of data and absolutely crucially it creates a governance process to give the citizen assurance that we're doing this in a very open, transparent, legal and simplistic way we're very keen obviously that others can benefit from our data and one of the other things that the state did that was very much go ahead and thinking was it established an open data board that board's made up of various volunteers from academia from the private sector and so on and very much focused on how we can exploit our data how we can make better use of it and as you can see in terms of data sets and so on it's starting to really gain traction and it was actually named as in the top three best open data environments in Europe which is something obviously that we were very pleased about So finally, will it work? Well, those of you who know me know I have a very random way of thinking about life and in the run up to the fight this week it did actually occur to me that in some respects this represented the challenge of Europe in dealing with the e-government strategy in the digital single market So if you don't know anything about boxing let me just explain the background of this The guy in the left Mayweather is the guy who's purported to be the greatest pound for pound boxer who's ever lived and he's 40 years old he had won 49 consecutive fights and like many boxers this temptation of the 5-0 to move one ahead of Rocky Marciano drove him into taking this fight Now the guy on the right is obviously Ireland's own Connor McGregor who's actually a mixed martial arts champion had never boxed before but was young and fit, slightly mad and was up for the challenge of taking this fight but the point I want to make is to enable this extravaganza to take place the desire was there on both sides but the debate became about the standards to make this happen because you had two different sporting disciplines that wanted to come together so then it was about first of all what size would the ring be how heavy should their gloves be how weighted should the floor of the ring be etc etc and the amount of intense negotiations and work and so on that underpinned this taking place was immense and I'm sure all the people who watched this in pay-per-view didn't realise the substantial efforts that actually had to go into making this take place so what struck me was the digital single marketing of an action plan and the work that's going on probably isn't obvious to the people who read the papers who watch the television and hear about it but the prize is enormous and it makes the work worthwhile and it's a journey we've just got to follow on so with that I will pass over to my three esteemed colleagues on the left