Inclusive Sourcing: Are You Ready to Take the Call?
Widening the gate on your supply chain is a hard-nosed business decision, not a charity initiative.

Empowering Our Future – Building an Inclusive Workforce – Mansion House - Tuesday 23rd September, 2025 Dublin Chamber & Dublin City Council

Watch here a 1:23m clip focused on supply chain inclusion.

Watch here the full 8:14m speech.

Take the call on Supply Chain Inclusion.

Tuesday, September 23, 2025, at the Mansion House in Dublin, Seán Fay delivered a speech during the "Empowering Our Future" event. As the first-ever Dublin City Disability Ambassador, he focused on the critical need for inclusive practices in Ireland's corporate landscape.
Dublin City Disability Ambassador, Seán Fay delivers a speech calling for a fundamental shift in how businesses use the spending power of their supply chain to unlock more innovation from a wider range of entrepreneurs.
Key Dialogue: Seán Fay explicitly asks "Ireland Inc" to "Take the Call" for supply chain inclusion. He frames inclusion not as charity, but as a matter of parity and a "Win-Win" for companies and entrepreneurs with a difference.
The Lesson: He argues that businesses should focus on the impact someone can make rather than just their background or corporate structure. By mentioning his own "fact-driven nature" as a neurodivergent founder, he tells the audience gathered that just two US FDI companies in attendance had a supply spend with disabled business owners in the USA in 2025 of around $7 billion, but zero in their Irish operations.
The Wagner-O'Day Act of 1938 created the USA's first federal procurement mandate by requiring government agencies to buy products from workshops employing blind individuals, establishing the earliest foundation for supplier diversity.
Today, US federal law mandates that modern enterprises track and direct billions of dollars in procurement spend to disability-owned suppliers. 32 of the 43 companies who make up the Billion Dollar Roundtable (BDR) — those Fortune 500 companies with the largest supply chain inclusion spend in the world — operate in Ireland.
A year on from this call, not a cent of the billions spent for decades on their supply chain inclusion happens in Ireland.

"Inclusive Networks Powering Dublin" - At the ESB HQ as part of Dublin Tech Week 2026 - Ireland's National Development Plan is circa €1,000 investment per second until the end of 2035.

The NDP as a boom for Irish SMEs, supporting innovation.

Can we build a better tomorrow by making better use of all of today?
In Dublin Tech Week 2026, we saw the importance of events not being just a place for claps, likes, and posts — we need outcomes more than "energy in the room." After raising the link between being neurodiverse in Ireland and being in prison, at similar rates to being one of our top entrepreneurs, the issue of AI reader pens not being allowed in came up on Ireland's AI committee. Seán Fay picked up the phone, called Jack Churchill, and he took the call — the pens were restored by Christmas 2025. Someone with a difference could read a Christmas card without help. Results happen here, never on a stage.
The National Development Plan represents circa €1,000 invested every second, all the way to 2035 — room enough for everyone. This investment gives the opportunity to build homes, roads, networks, and transport that will change Ireland. It must also build communities, careers, and people, with a direct responsibility to always think "Who is not in this room, but should be?"
We saw some of this on the day, with Anne Gaskin Roe detailing how ESB Networks apprenticeship scheme has reached new heights and gone further into Ireland's DEIS school system, while Caroline detailed further progress on the employment of people with a difference. The ESB has a responsibility to have at least 6% of its staff be people with a difference — it is 50% over this. Outcomes have numbers.
With Seán's plea to US companies in Ireland made at the Empowering Our Future event being unsuccessful, it gives more importance to state directed spending to build supply chain inclusion — if we can't bring it to Ireland, we must build it in Ireland. Widening the gate, to all of the Village.