Joe Gill: Broadband plan still holds the key to rural connectivity

If you lounge around small village communities in the greater Dublin and London areas you can get a sense of how a new generation of urbanisation is at work.

Higher levels of local employment, young families and savvy entrepreneurs have helped create a new style of urban communities where local enterprises and internationally-focused businesses co-habit fruitfully.

Such a template cannot only be replicated but actually improved on by applying imagination towards driving forward rural town and village life in Ireland through a full-blooded embrace of technology and hard-headed commercialism.