Irish charms keep US giants sweet for now – Chicago Tribune

At Thursday’s lunch, Noonan reiterated that the corporate tax rate was “not negotiable”.

FOREIGN ACCENTS

Multinationals have benefited from Ireland’s economic crash as business costs have fallen back to 2003 levels, according to the IDA, the agency tasked with attracting foreign investment.

U.S. multinationals currently employ over 100,000 of Ireland’s 1.8 million strong workforce and a host of companies, including PayPal and Apple , are expanding.

Dublin commercial property prices, once on a par with Manhattan and Moscow, have more than halved. Capitalising on this, Google spent 100 million euros last year on the tallest commercial office building in Dublin. The U.S. technology giant plans to kit it out with a swimming pool in the basement for its 2,000 plus staff.

But high-tech companies are struggling to find enough talent in Ireland, where graduates preferred to become architects or real estate agents during the property-fuelled boom years rather than software engineers or scientists.

Multinationals are fighting over recruits from overseas who have brought plethora of foreign accents to the coffee shops and sandwich bars of Dublin’s trendy south docklands area, where Google and Facebook have large offices.

In September, a senior Facebook executive said the firm would continue investing in Ireland, where it already has over 400 staff, as long as it could find the right sort of employees.

Conscious of the problem, the government has introduced tax breaks for overseas workers who move to Ireland.

Peter O’Neill, head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland, said Ireland can not rest on its laurels if it wants to attract the right worker and the right companies to Ireland.

“The bar is getting higher all the time,” said O’Neill, who is chief of IBM Ireland. “Investment is mobile, people are mobile, you’ve got to have the right environment at all times.”

PATENT CLIFF

A strategy to lure drugs companies, started in the 1960s, has made Ireland the largest net exporter of pharmaceuticals in the world, according to Dublin-based industry group PharmaChemicalIreland. Products such as Viagra and Botox are manufactured in the country.