After three days of talks, panels and discussions across nine stages, with hundreds of speakers and more than 20,000 attending, it’s not surprising that by the close of this year’s Web Summit on Thursday evening, many observers were comparing the experience to a rock festival. Appropriately, the final session featured Bono remarking that “the sort of people who used to be in a band are now creating start-ups ... I get off on that excitement, that thrill of making s**t up.”

So when summit founder Paddy Cosgrave expressed his frustration at the internet access problems which bedevilled the event again this year by exploding that “old dudes hold this country back”, he may have been channelling his own inner rock star.

It is telling though that, in the modern world, denial of wifi ranks as the worst of all possible misdeeds perpetrated by the older generation against the young.

In truth, rock ’n roll is just one small part of it. The fact that this year’s event covered such a broad range of themes and subjects reflects how the creative and entrepreneurial ethos of Silicon Valley has permeated society. As one commentator noted recently, “at some point, tech stopped being an industry and turned into the substrate of most things changing in urban culture.”

Cosgrave deserves great credit for his own entrepreneurial skills in tapping so successfully and so quickly into that zeitgeist, growing the summit from a small, low-key event four years ago to the globally recognised landmark it is now. It is difficult – perhaps impossible – to quantify exactly the amount of real business done around the fringes of the event, or its full impact on the local economy. But there is no gainsaying the positive image it promotes of Ireland as a modern, innovative country open to new ideas. In that respect, the parallels are striking between the place of the summit in today’s Ireland and the impact U2’s international success had on the Ireland of a quarter of a century ago.