Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I may quote the Deputy on that in the future. I may even include it in my leaflets, particularly those for consumption around the country.

The announcement of 1,000 jobs by Amazon in Dublin is extraordinarily welcome. It is a real vote of confidence in the Irish economy. Realistically, jobs like those provided by major tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and so on will only happen in big cities with a critical mass. If those jobs had not gone to Dublin, they would not have gone elsewhere in Ireland. They would have gone to Tel Aviv, San Francisco or Amsterdam. We need to realistic about that.

That is not to say, however, that we cannot have foreign direct investment, FDI, in all parts of Ireland. We have had many positive job announcements around the country and very much outside the Dublin region. I will give the Deputy a few recent examples of job announcements. There were 350 by Abtran in Sligo, 200 by Combilift in Monaghan, 200 by Avery Dennison in Longford, 187 by Crowley Carbon in Wicklow, 220 by Netwatch in Carlow-----

See this speech in context