evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Connected Hubs — Ireland's National Remote-Work Network for Rural Talent Retention

Ireland · Ballaghaderreen · See the Ireland profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 12% 86/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Ireland's Connected Hubs network grew from a 2019 pilot to over 400 co-working hubs in every county by 2025; the wider community-hub sector generates €1.8bn in annual economic value and 18,600+ jobs, and the model is now being piloted in France and Finland.

400 hubs
Hubs onboarded nationwide (by Nov 2025)
15,000+ users
Registered platform users (by Nov 2025)
1.8 € billion
Community/innovation hub sector Gross Value Added (2023)
18,600+ jobs
FTE jobs supported by the hub sector (2023)
200+ € million
Enterprise Ireland & government funding invested in hub sector (over three decades)
Connected Hubs — Ireland's National Remote-Work Network for Rural Talent Retention

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Western Development Commission (WDC) & Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht
Period
2019–present
Region (NUTS)
IE04
Keywords
Remote-work infrastructure, rural regional development, talent retention, digital hubs

Context

Connected Hubs is Ireland's government-backed national network of digitally-enabled co-working and remote-working hubs, begun as a 2019 regional pilot by the Western Development Commission (WDC) and scaled nationwide from 2021 under the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht's 'Our Rural Future' strategy. It lets people work close to home rather than migrating to Dublin, and by November 2025 had onboarded its 400th hub across every Irish county, serving over 15,000 registered users.

Activities

Delivery runs through a nationally coordinated booking/management platform operated by the WDC alongside the Department of Rural and Community Development and hundreds of individually run local hubs; the WDC is now helping France and Finland pilot comparable national hub networks in 2025-26.

Results

Independent CEAI/Wheel research found the wider community enterprise and innovation hub sector — which Connected Hubs funding has helped expand — generated €1.8 billion in Gross Value Added and supported more than 18,600 FTE jobs in 2023, on top of over €200 million in Enterprise Ireland and government funding invested over three decades. These figures describe the broader hub sector rather than isolating Connected Hubs-registered sites, and no causal study measures how many people specifically stayed in or returned to rural Ireland because of hub access.

Implementation
Indicative cost
High (€500k–€5M)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Western Development Commission (statutory regional body) as national coordinating body, Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht as policy sponsor, Individually operated staff/managers at each of the 400+ local hub sites

Conditions for success

  • Sustained multi-year government funding via Enterprise Ireland and the Department of Rural and Community Development
  • A single national coordinating body providing a shared booking/management platform across hundreds of independently run hubs
  • Integration into a broader national rural-development strategy ('Our Rural Future')

Common failure modes

  • Reliance on continued state funding and departmental prioritisation of rural policy
  • Attribution difficulty could weaken the case for continued investment if a rigorous impact evaluation is later commissioned

Where it fits

Governance type
national government + statutory regional development body
Scale
national (all counties)
Income level
high-income (EU/OECD)

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

Similar practices you may find useful

★ 62

Boomerang Greensboro

United States of America

Action Greensboro's Boomerang Greensboro campaign (2021–) helps former residents relocate back to the city; an independent Lightcast study of confirmed …