John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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58. To ask the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment the amount of inward investment into County Wicklow over the past five years, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [30489/24]

Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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IDA Ireland is now in the final year of its 2021-24 strategy, “Driving Recovery and Sustainable Growth”, and has already achieved or is on track to achieve all targets set across the five strategic pillars of the strategy: Growth, Transformation, Regions, Sustainability, and Impact.

The IDA 2024 Mid-Year results announced this week indicate a strong performance across foreign direct investment indicators set out in this strategy, as targets for the total number of investments, job approvals, regional investment and number of sustainability projects supported by the agency are now exceeded.

The strong regional performance delivered during 2023, where there were 132 investments outside of Dublin, representing 54% of total investments, continued this year with 74 of the 131 investments supported by IDA in the first half of 2024 are planned for regional locations.

The Mid-East Region comprises counties Kildare, Louth, Meath and Wicklow. There are 118 IDA client companies in this region, employing 20,429 people. The FDI performance in the region has been consistent over the past five years with employment among IDA clients increasing by 14%. The total number of regional jobs in IDA client companies at end 2023 stands at 163,471.

The Mid-East has a significant ecosystem of well-established companies across Technology, Life Sciences, International Financial Services and Engineering & Industrial Technologies. It has also won significant investment in the Food and the Film sub-sectors.

The IDA is working to strengthen and deepen the linkages between multinational companies, SMEs, the research ecosystem, and the wider economy through clustering and building linkages with indigenous enterprise, and RD&I collaboration.

At Government level we are focused on competitiveness and ensuring that Ireland is the best place in Europe to invest and grow. Successful implementation of national policy and strategies developed in recent years, including the Government’s White Paper on Enterprise, National Development Plan Review, Climate Action Plans, Review of the National Planning framework etc is required to underpin future success in attracting inward investment and safeguard Ireland’s attractiveness as destination for FDI.

The number of IDA client companies in County Wicklow and the numbers employed from 2019-2023 are shown in the table below: