February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
IDA Ireland struck an upbeat tone at the launch of its 2004 annual report last week. The agency said that 2004 was the first year since the turn of the millennium tech crash in which more jobs were created in Ireland by IDA clients than were lost.
Despite the agency’s bullishness, however, gains only won out narrowly over losses. Overall, the agency reported a net gain of 197 jobs from its clients – 10,825 were created and 10,628 lost.
Nonetheless, that record compares very favorably with the figures from 2002 and 2003, during which net losses of 4,112 jobs and 3,630 jobs respectively were incurred.
IDA executives sought to talk up the results. The agency’s CEO Sean Dorgan said: “2004 saw the strategic effort by IDA and its partners over the previous three years come to fruition. As a result, it was a watershed year in terms of the quality and nature of investments won.”
Those sentiments were reinforced by chairman John Dunne, who insisted that Ireland had increasingly come to be regarded as the template that other nations should follow.
Referring to what he claimed were convincing indicators of Ireland’s success in attracting foreign direct investment, Dunne asserted that there was now “increasing international recognition of Ireland as a global investment powerhouse. Business and community leaders everywhere point to our success as a model of how a country and its people can transform into a dynamic world-leading center for business growth.”
The agency also noted the range and significance of investments into Ireland by outside companies. Sean Dorgan listed Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Merrill Lynch and Yahoo as among the leading corporations that had made significant commitments to their Irish operations during 2004.
Dorgan went on to catalogue a number of projects that had been brought to fruition with IDA support and had resulted in job creation.
Among those he listed were the decision by Toucan, a telecoms company, to base its customer service center, which will employ 300 people, in Sligo; an expansion of Irish operations by PFPC International, a US financial services company, that should bring 500 high-caliber jobs to Wexford and Navan, Co. Meath; and an expansion by software company SITA Ltd in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, that is expected to result in the creation of 123 jobs.
The IDA also claimed that the average salary across all the new jobs created by its clients in Ireland during 2004 was