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.
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 recognising achievements and that results have numbers and outcomes.
This included detailing how the ESB apprenticeship scheme has reached new heights and gone further into Ireland's DEIS school system, as well as further progress on the employment of people with a difference. Internal survey data shows that ESB is a leading champion in this space, with 10% of responding staff self-identifying as having a difference—comfortably outpacing the state's 6% public sector requirement and demonstrating the real impact of its inclusive culture.
Panellists spoke of hearing about a problem via Ireland's AI committee in relation to technology to assist education in Dublin’s prison system. Through direct collaboration between advocates, senators, civil servants, and the technology's manufacturing founder, a solution was delivered to get them back in. The assistive reader pens were successfully restored by Christmas 2025, ensuring 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?"
The event included Ireland's first all neurodiverse SME owner panel.
Take the call on Supply Chain Inclusion.
Empowering Our Future – Building an Inclusive Workforce – Mansion House - Tuesday 23rd September, 2025 Dublin Chamber & Dublin City Council
The #WVH founder Seán Fay delivered a speech as the first-ever Dublin City Disability Ambassador, he focused on the critical need for inclusive practices in Ireland’s corporate landscape.
A please 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.
He 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.
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.
Irish centred investment like the NDP has to build in Ireland the inclusive economy we can no longer wait to be brought to Ireland, we must build it here.