Irish multinational jobs growth up 43% y/y as tech cuts begin

By Padraic Halpin

DUBLIN (Reuters) -Foreign-owned multinationals in Ireland added a record number of jobs in the year to end October, up 43% on last year’s previous high as the state investment agency forecast slower growth for 2023 as some large tech companies let staff go.

Ireland is hugely reliant on foreign companies whose total number of employees have almost doubled in the last decade to 301,000, or 12% of the entire workforce. They also pay a large chunk of the country’s income and corporate taxes.

A net job gain of just over 24,000 included 8,407 job losses, down on last year’s 12,231.

IDA Ireland said this did not include many of the local layoffs tech firms including Facebook parent Meta, Twitter and Stripe have announced recently as part of global cutbacks.

IDA Ireland Interim CEO Mary Buckley said she expected that tech firms may cut some more jobs next year but that the sector would continue to grow in the future.

While a positive pipeline of investments are lined up across other sectors for the first half of 2023, the severe headwinds facing the global economy means companies are going to be “much more cautious” next year, Buckley added.

“So slower growth is likely in 2023 with less clarity in the second half of next year,” she said.

Some of Ireland’s largest multinational employers were among the 242 firms that added jobs, including Apple, TikTok, Dell, IBM, Citi, Abbott, Pfizer and Workday.

Almost half of the companies that created news jobs invested in Ireland for the first time.

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Chizu Nomiyama)