Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

In reply to the Deputy, I will refer to Monthly Estimates of Payroll Employees, published by the CSO, which should be read alongside the CSO's labour force survey. The latter has shown that employment in the ICT sector rose by 2.2% on a quarterly basis in the second quarter on 2023 to reach a new record high of over 174,000. We have more people employed in ICT now than we ever had. Of course, there have been some setbacks since the start of this year but there have also been strong gains at the same time.

As we all know, global economic headwinds have led to contraction for some tech clients over the past 12 months, particularly in the first quarter of the year. However, for Ireland the impacts have, in very many cases, been less significant than the global reductions announced. For those directly impacted, the Government has a range of supports in place.

At a sectoral level, IDA Ireland continues to actively support our technology base, with 320 IDA Ireland client companies employing 64,000 people in Ireland. Moreover, the commitment of technology companies to Ireland continues to be exceptionally strong as Ireland remains an attractive location of choice for companies. For example, in the past year several new investments in microelectronics and semiconductors, in cloud computing and in data storage have been announced in Ireland, including by Analog Devices, Intel, Qualcomm and AMD.

We have seen this year some to-ing and fro-ing in the sector. Certainly in the earlier part of the year, many big names internationally made decisions to reduce the numbers they were employing worldwide, having had extraordinary growth in the previous two years. That affected Ireland because many of the companies have headquarters for Europe and elsewhere in Ireland. In general, the percentages of losses in Ireland were not as high as they were globally, but they were still impactful. We know that. What is not often talked about is the number of companies taking on people in the tech sector. The vast majority of people who lost their jobs earlier this year found employment pretty quickly because of their skill set. Of course, we will continue to work with them.

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