Transform Gov - the digital government podcast

Before AI can change healthcare, the record underneath it has to be right. In this episode, we speak with Helen Waters, Executive Vice President and COO of Meditech, about what Ireland needs to get right first as it moves towards a national electronic health record, and what 22 countries’ experience can teach us. Meditech develops electronic health records. It has more than 30 years in healthcare...

Every new policy asks people to do something differently, but training is often treated as a mere afterthough, taking place after rollout. So what if we flipped the process? What if we treated learning as an essential, so policy actually changes what happens on the ground? In this episode, we speak with Gavin Woods, Managing Director of Aurion Learning, who has spent almost 26 years helping govern...

Recorded live at the All-Ireland Clinical AI Congress in Belfield, this episode features Dr Amrita Kumar, Radiology and AI Clinical Lead at Medica and a consultant breast radiologist who has built hospital-wide AI implementation from scratch — first in the NHS, now in the UAE. What you can take from this episode: 🔹 Don't rush to a pilot — set up governance first. Dr Kumar discovered her hospi...

Ireland is about to spend €275 billion on infrastructure with a workforce that's already stretched. So what is the difference between AI as a nice-to-have productivity tool, and AI as the thing that actually closes the gap between what we need to deliver and the people we have to deliver it? Stephen Bradley and João Silva from Accenture return to go deeper: not just what goes wrong on infrastr...

Ireland has committed €275 billion to infrastructure by 2035. Globally, 9 out of 10 major projects fail to deliver on plan, scope, or budget. What goes wrong, and can Ireland beat the odds using AI, digitisation and know-how? In Part 1 of this special two-part podcast series, host Maeve Kneafsey speaks with Stephen Bradley, lead author of Accenture's research into Ireland's infrastructure delivery...

Could Irish Rail have saved the State €16.5 million, and got a working traffic management system, if its project had been managed differently? Today, guest James Louttit — Founder and Lead Trainer at Impactful Project Management — argues that successful projects come down to some surprisingly simple disciplines: focus on value, prioritise needs, make risk visible, force governance to make decision...

Public services need to deliver more, for a growing and increasingly complex population, but the people and technology resources available to do it are finite. Could AI change that? In Part 2 of her conversation with Transform Gov, Audrey O'Mahony of Accenture gets practical about where AI could have its biggest impact and how we reskill to meet the challenge. She explains how public-sector CIOs a...

For decades, Ireland has built its economic identity on being a knowledge economy: highly skilled, highly educated, and a magnet for global investment. Agentic AI is about to test whether that advantage still holds. Most conversations about AI start with cost – how do we do more with less? Audrey O'Mahony, Accenture's Head of Talent Reinvention for UKIA, argues that's the wrong starting point enti...

Ireland's Government CIO Louise McKeever returns for part 2 to talk about what it actually takes to join up government services around citizens. Louise takes us inside: 🔹 Digital building blocks — the reusable infrastructure (gov.ie, e-forms, payments, messaging, a digital wallet) that means departments don't have to rebuild the same systems 🔹 Leading without authority — how you coordinate a who...

Louise McKeever started her civil service career as a clerical assistant in 1995. Today, she is the first woman to serve as Ireland’s Government CIO. In Part 1 of this conversation with TransformGov host Maeve Kneafsey, Louise takes us inside: 🔹 Intreo — how Community Welfare Services, Activation Services and Local Office operations were merged into a single case management model, integrating two...

An Garda Síochána is replacing paper files, ageing technology and fragmented information with mobile devices, body-worn cameras, drones and carefully governed AI. But transforming one of Ireland’s largest and most complex public services is not simply a technology project. It means changing how thousands of Gardaí work — while protecting public trust, individual rights and the judgement of the off...

Episode Highlights: Crisis Management: Maria's resilience was tested through the COVID crisis and the Ukrainian refugee crisis, where she played a pivotal role in managing the response efforts. Tune in to hear how she used "energy buckets" to build team resilience. Data Security Challenges: Discussing the ongoing data security issues faced by the HSE, Maria underscores the inevitability of cyber t...

How do you redesign a public service used by people from almost every country in the world? In this episode of Transform Gov, Maeve Kneafsey speaks with Paul Rooney and Roshan Wijesinghe from the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration about the Department’s digital contact centre for immigration services. This is a story about far more than technology. The Department was dealing with hi...

What if your next hospital appointment happened from your kitchen table? In Part 2 of Transform Gov, Professor Derek O'Keeffe explains how Ireland is using digital technology to rethink healthcare delivery — from remote islands to nursing homes, prisons and beyond. You'll hear how: *Patients can be monitored safely at home. *Chronic diseases can be managed before emergencies happen. *Virtual hospi...

What if the biggest challenge in healthcare wasn't medicine... ...but getting the right people to work together? In Part 1 of this fascinating conversation, Professor Derek O'Keeffe — consultant endocrinologist, engineer and founder of the Hive Lab at the University of Galway — explains why solving healthcare problems often starts outside the hospital. From delivering medicines by drone after Stor...

Justin Gleeson explains how a small team from government, Maynooth University and Ordnance Survey Ireland came together in March 2020 to create the platform that millions of us watched every evening behind Tony Holohan. A fascinating story about what can happen when technology, data and public service all pull in the same direction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens when local heritage meets digital innovation? In this episode of Transform Gov, Maeve Kneafsey speaks with Marie Mannion, Heritage Officer, and Brídín Feeney from the GIS team at Galway County Council. Winners of the 2025 Ireland eGovernment Open Data Award , their StoryMaps project is transforming how communities discover, preserve and share local heritage. From digitising more than...

Fear of saying the wrong thing. Fear of making things worse. Fear of even starting the conversation. In this episode of Transform Gov, Maeve Kneafsey speaks with Ailish O’Neill from the HSE’s National Suicide Prevention Office about “Let’s Talk About Suicide” — the winner of the 2025 Ireland eGovernment Education Award. This is a digital learning programme designed to help ordinary people recognis...

What actually happens when a country decides to digitise itself? Not the theory. Not the strategy decks. The real story. Over 23 years, Ireland’s public sector has gone from: • Paper forms, post and phone calls • To online transactions people trust • To fully integrated, citizen-first services • And now… cautiously stepping into AI This episode is a rare step back — a straight, honest look at what...

Two years and nine months. That’s how long people were waiting in the system — until everything had to change. What happens when a public service built for 3,000 applications a year suddenly faces over 18,000? That was the reality facing Ireland’s International Protection Office — a system under intense pressure, with growing backlogs, long delays, and real human consequences. In this episode of T...

An insider's guide to a brilliant entry for the Ireland eGovernment Awards Most teams think awards are about technology, scale, or budget. They’re not. On this episode of Transform Gov, we sit down with Declan Tuite, Head Judge of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, and Maeve Kneafsey, to break down what really separates winning entries from the rest. Why strong projects fall short. What judges are ac...

In Part 2 of this Transform Gov conversation, Marie Wallace (Accenture) moves beyond the concept of digital identity — and explains what it actually means in practice for service delivery, cost, and efficiency. The headline figure? Up to €8 billion in economic impact for Ireland. But the real story is where that value comes from: removing manual verification from services eliminating repeated onbo...

Digital identity is often talked about — but rarely understood in practical terms. In this episode of Transform Gov, Maeve Kneafsey speaks with Marie Wallace, Managing Director and Global Lead for Digital Identities at Accenture, about what is broken in how we prove who we are today — and what is changing. From repeatedly filling out forms to sharing far more personal data than necessary, Marie ex...

In this episode of Transform Gov, Maeve Kneafsey sits down with Malcolm Byrne TD, Chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Artificial Intelligence, to unpack what has actually changed — and why the pace of change is now the real issue. From courts using AI for real-time translation… to Revenue analysing thousands of tax codes… to the uncomfortable truth that other countries are already moving faster —...

COVID changed how people engage with online services — permanently. The organisations that adapted are now seeing better engagement, better access, better outcomes . The rest are still catching up. In this episode of Transform Gov, Maeve Kneafsey speaks with Aoife Prendergast of Technological University of the Shannon (TUS) , whose team won the Universal Design category at the Ireland eGovernment...