Ireland’s Enterprise Minister to meet with US Tech Leaders
Simon Coveney TD, the Irish Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, is travelling to the US West Coast this week for a series of high-level meetings including with a number of tech companies with bases in Ireland.
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.
Recently, a number of US tech companies have announced job cuts across the globe. Companies including Twitter, Meta, Stripe, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, TikTok, Google and IBM have all announced job cuts as share prices in many tech companies fall.
Salesforce was the latest tech company to announce job losses including 200 jobs to go in its Irish operation following the announcement in January that it was to cut its global workforce by 10%.
The Minister said that IDA, the Irish state agency responsible for inward investment in the country, continues to see a healthy pipeline of investment for the first half of this year despite the global challenges.
Commenting on the recent spate of job losses, Minister Coveney said, ‘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.’
He said, ‘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.’
Highlighting the importance of US investment and US trade relations to the Irish economy, Minister Coveney 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.’
Image by MFA Russia/Via Openverse/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
