Piltown have won the .IE Digital Town Awards.
The group from Piltown won the €19,000 prize as they set up Ireland’s first community owned and managed fibre-broadband network.
Piltown’s ‘Taking charge of our Digital Future’ project took home top prize in the Digital Business category at the awards ceremony yesterday (Wednesday), and was also named the overall winner.
Piltown, Co Kilkenny won the overall prize at the 2022 .IE Digital Town Awards presented by Minister @Damien_English.
The Awards honour local town projects and people that use digital innovation & technologies for the betterment of towns, citizens, & services in the community pic.twitter.com/aUYyL8Brfw
— Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment (@DeptEnterprise) June 8, 2022
Urlingford’s “Community Digital Equity” project was also shortlisted for today’s awards.
Councillor Maria Dollard is hailing the work done by a local community group and talking to Sue Nunn on The Way It Is says she’s always been impressed by the ambition of their plan.
“I remember seeing Brian from Piltown talking about how they were going to bring broadband to their town, they weren’t going to wait for it to be rolled out because they didn’t think that they would kind of get it in time. So they did, and you know, they were at the forefront of Kilkenny of deciding they were going to make sure they had a hub, that they were going to bring people in to their town. They might spend money in a ccoffee shop or whatever it was and it’s great to see they were the overall winners”
You can catch Cllr Maria Dollards interview here.
