Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 19 September 2013
Public Accounts Committee
Annual Report and Accounts 2012: Discussion with IDA Ireland
11:40 am
Mr. Barry O'Leary:
We actually have an exercise going on at the moment to quantify that. The figure is quite substantial and could be in the order of 70,000 to 80,000. Tesco, for example, is a multinational company employing 15,000 people here. Ulster Bank also employs significant numbers of people. While such companies are not clients, that is not to say we do not interact with them, but our interaction is in the context of targeting international activities - in other words, things such as making Ireland the base for their international supply chain management, their IT systems, shared services and so forth. It is not that we do not deal with such companies; rather, we do not deal with them on their Irish market business.
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