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Around 470 new Irish jobs are to be created in three IDA-supported investments worth over EUR70 million, Tanaiste Mary Harney announced on Wednesday.
Internet security company Symantec Corporation is to establish the company's only R&D facility in Europe and will also expand its existing production facility at Blanchardstown, Co. Dublin, creating 250 new jobs.
Dundalk-based Quantum Corporation, a provider of data protection and network storage systems, will create 120 new jobs in production and operations-related areas. The Quantum expansion, which was originally announced in August, will be welcome news to the Dundalk region, which has suffered a spate of job losses in the past year.
The third investment, which is worth EUR52 million alone, is by Servier Industries for the expansion of its pharmaceutical operation in Arklow, Co. Wicklow. This is expected to add over 100 new jobs and treble the production capacity at the factory.
"The investments are very much in keeping with the government's policy of encouraging existing overseas companies to make further investments in order to enhance the value of their operations and allow them to offer high quality employment," the Tanaiste said.
The announcements will also be good news for the government following the publication of a UN report on Tuesday revealing a 60 percent drop in the level of foreign direct investment in Ireland by multinational companies, from USD24 billion in 2000 to less than USD10 billion in 2001.
However, Forfas, which contributed to the UN report, also said on Tuesday that when the global situation was factored in, the IDA did well to contain the reduction in investment to the USD14.3 billion loss suffered. The UN report pointed out that three multinational companies -- Intel, Dell and Microsoft -- dominate Irish manufactured exports.
Clearly, much of the fallout is due to the downturn in the IT sector, and while the focus is on helping IT companies already based here to consolidate and grow, there is little prospect of new overseas investment, an IDA Ireland spokesman told ElectricNews.Net.
Some of the more recent jobs announcements have come from companies expanding their R&D facilities, such as e-learning firm NetG in April and financial services provider GMAC Commercial in March.
When asked if the latest jobs announcement reflected a stronger focus by the IDA on R&D-type jobs to replace some of the many production-based jobs lost in the IT sector in the past year, the spokesman said that all of the new jobs "related to adding more valuable high skills rather than production work."
"The structure of the economy demands that we look long term at sustainability and that means creating high skill-based jobs," he said.
Speaking yesterday at the Waterford Institute of Technology annual conference on the subject of IDA's inward investment strategy, chief executive Sean Dorgan said that Ireland is competing for a new kind of manufacturing industry. "The type of industrial job that will increasingly emerge in Ireland will be at the top end of the value chain: the innovation, the research and development, the pilot production plants for new advanced products, the first location using the newest technology in the industry worldwide."
"That is not to say that Ireland does not have a future in manufacturing; it does, but it will be through more advanced, sophisticated and complex processes based on knowledge and skills."
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