Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

US businesses form the biggest component of these investments. More than 450 US companies operate in Ireland and they have invested over $55 billion in this country.

In regard to competitiveness issues, significant adjustments are clearly being made to labour cost competitiveness in the context of this downturn. The European Commission and others have commented on the flexibility displayed by the Irish workforce in taking wage cuts across many sectors not only in the interest of maintaining the maximum level of employment as we go through this downturn and its reduced orders and real economic effects, but also in response to the need to address the competitiveness question. It is also clear that labour cost competitiveness is not the full picture when it comes to competitiveness. Ireland's ability to compete also relates to the quality of our people, the output of our work and the higher productivity available here.

In regard to why people invest, certain sectors of American industry, such as low end manufacturing, are no longer interested in coming to Ireland because they can find better locations at home in the United States or in South America and other parts of the world. For some time, Ireland's strategy has been to enter the area of high value manufacturing because that is where the best wages are provided for our people. That strategy has worked very well for us.

Jobs churn in every country or society that matures and develops. Thankfully we are all earning better wages now than we did 25 years ago because the jobs of that period are now located elsewhere. The jobs now available could never have been contemplated without the various changes that have taken place and the investments made in education and research and development. I have been told in New York by certain industries that they could not consider Ireland as a location once they learned our average industrial wage. However, other companies, including the leaders in several sectors of the modern economy, have located here and many spin off jobs arise from their investments as Irish entrepreneurs feed into the supply chains and begin to internationalise their businesses. This is reflected in the two-way trade that now takes place between the United States and Ireland not only in volume or value terms, but also in the cross-investments in US companies by Irish entrepreneurs to the tune of directly employing 82,000 over there.

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