OPINION
IDA Ireland’s Global Office Network
won’t provide those locations. We do this because we understand both the profound effect job creation has outside the capital and the scope these locations can provide to potential investors, particularly those in the manufacturing industry, for one. Regional locations have a lot to offer, but we have work to do in convincing investors.
Which are the Irish FDI growth industries, in your view? They will be in the life sciences: pharma, biopharma, medtech; and financial services
sectors that we are involved in will have a high tech aspect to them, which plays very much to our strengths.
Can data now be considered Ireland’s ‘natural resource’? Data is the lifeblood of a lot of companies, and not just technology companies. Ireland is well placed in relation to both the use and the storage of data. Our conditions are appropriate to data storage, and Ireland is stable from every perspective: political, geological, climactic. It’s part of a bigger
has proven to be extremely strong. I think we can win more in manufacturing and certainly a focus of IDA is manufacturing, specifically in encouraging more investments into the regions. We have some new areas that we are focussing on, which include arts and culture – particularly within film-related activity – I would like to see a growth there. We are interested in the marine, and we are also interested in property as a mobile investment. Technology is going to continue apace, which means that all of the
story around technology. On one side, we have some of the world’s leading players here – everything from Intel’s semiconductor wafer fabrication facility in Leixlip, through to IBM and Microsoft who have been here for decades, and all of the internet companies within two square miles of here, including LinkedIn (next door), Google, Yahoo, Facebook. And we have a really vibrant technology ecosystem in all sectors, whether it’s cloud, social, mobile, data analytics, Internet of
20 INNOVATION IRELAN REVIEW
Things, security, and it is impacting on all of the sectors that we are most interested in – whether that’s pharma, biopharma, medical devices, financial services, engineering, food. What we’re seeing increasingly is those sectors bleeding into one another; we talk about convergence. This is where innovation happens – different things coming together to create something new.
Finally Martin, where do you see Ireland, and the role of IDA, three years from now? Before I explain the future, I should say where we are: we’ve had a phenomenal year in 2015, with 213 investments announced, and one in five private sector jobs in the Irish economy coming as a result of FDI…that’s hugely positive. My job is to make sure we continue in this vein. We’ve completed year one of ‘Winning’, our five-year strategy, which has set a target for 80,000 new jobs and 900 new investments by end-2019. Keeping that very high investment flow level will be extremely challenging, but we have a lot of things in our favour at the moment; including oil prices, exchange rates and low interest rates. We need to ensure we remain competitive, that government continues to maintain our pro-business stance, and we need to invest in infrastructure and enterprise development. If we do all of those right things, I think Ireland has an extremely bright future indeed.
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