Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 19 September 2013
Public Accounts Committee
Annual Report and Accounts 2012: Discussion with IDA Ireland
10:40 am
Mr. Barry O'Leary:
Absolutely, including for new ones we want to attract to Ireland such as Qualcomm, a huge IT company from San Diego, which set up in Cork this year and Huawei from China. The biggest support from a research and development point of view goes into the existing client base because it is important to help the transformation of the activities they are doing; in other words, moving them continuously to more sophisticated activities. For instance, in the medical devices or pharmaceutical area, we have put a lot of support into the development function because if Ireland gets the development function, it will get the manufacturing function as well. That is a productive return to have development and manufacturing co-located on the one site rather than having manufacturing here and research and development in Connecticut or wherever.