The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Simon Coveney, is travelling to the US West Coast for a series of high-level business meetings with a range of companies. Minister Coveney will hear from enterprise leaders and highlight Ireland’s strong FDI value proposition which remains our pro-enterprise policy environment, highly educated English-speaking workforce and our membership of the European Union.
The Minister will also visit some existing IDA Ireland client companies based in the region. Speaking ahead of his visit he reiterated that the IDA continues to see a healthy pipeline of investment in the first half of this year, “the Irish economy is very strong at the moment. Last year we saw an extra 24,000 jobs in IDA companies and that was led by the tech sector in many ways. We saw in terms of EI companies almost an extra 11,000 jobs and in terms of small companies that are relying on Local Enterprise Office supports, again we saw a net 3,500 jobs growth figure right across the country.”
“The impact on Ireland so far of tech sector announcements isn’t anything like the impact on some other countries and other parts of the world, but it will impact on some people and the State will be there to support those people. We have a very strong economy at the moment and a very strong tech sector.”
“Unlike many other countries across the European Union and across the world, in the context of the headwinds that we faced last year around increased costs, dramatic disruptions to supply chains and so on, Irish companies and multi-nationals here in Ireland have performed remarkably strongly. But we’re not going to be immune from the consequences of some of the global decisions that are being made in board rooms, particularly in the US, in terms of global businesses. The Irish economy is strong and growing, adding jobs and is at full employment. Last year we sanctioned more than 40,000 work permits, many of them to work in these multi-nationals.”
The United States is Ireland’s largest trading partner. In 2021 the value of trade between the two countries was €255 billion, which represented 30% of Ireland’s total global trade.
The Minister said, “more than 800 US multi-national companies invest over €5 billion in the Irish economy every year, creating over 180,000 jobs. For their part, indigenous Irish companies, spread across 800 locations throughout every US State and employing more than 110,000 people, have helped to make Ireland the ninth largest source of foreign direct investment in the US.”
FDI remains central to Ireland’s economic model and the recent White Paper on Enterprise seeks to advance Ireland’s FDI and trade value proposition and has a target of 20% increase in IDA client expenditure in Ireland by 2024.
