Biopharma group Amgen says it expects employment at the Irish arm of its business to jump by 40 per cent by 2030, bringing employee numbers here to 2,544.

The figure is contained in planning documents Amgen Technology (Ireland) UC has filed with Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council for an additional 1,087 car parking spaces at its Pottery Road base in south Dublin, bringing the total number of parking spaces on site to 1,303.

The US drugs giant proposes to build a six-storey 853-space car park alongside another 234 surface car spaces to deal with its growing employee numbers.

However, the scheme is facing opposition from a number of local residents due to the scale and massing of the multistorey car park and the council has now stalled the scheme, seeking further information.

A planning report lodged with the application showed that 1,816 people were employed at Pottery Rd last year and that this is to increase by 728 to 2,544 staff by 2030. Of those, 537 new staff are expected to be hired by 2027.

The report drawn up by Hughes Planning and Development Consultants said employment was expected to increase further – to 2,888 by 2035. It says the Pottery Rd site “is one of the company’s largest manufacturing sites outside of the US, thus playing a critical role in the global supply of its innovative medicines”.

The firm purchased the Pottery Rd site from Pfizer in 2011 and the report noted that the medicines produced at the site treat a wide array of conditions, including cancer, autoimmune diseases, high cholesterol and rare blood diseases

Planning consultant, Kevin Hughes said the production capacity of the facility “is projected to quadruple in the next three to five years, with a corresponding increase in workforce requirements to approximately 2,544 personnel in 2030”.

While it said that the requested 1,087 new parking spaces “are considered an absolute necessity to support the growth of the campus”, it added that Amgen was targeting a reduction in the number of staff relying on cars to get to work to 71 per cent of its workforce by 2028, “a significant reduction from its current rate, [and] an ambitious goal that Amgen are fully committed to reaching”.

The most recent accounts for Amgen Technology (Ireland) UC show that revenues increased by 41 per cent to $5.62 billion (€4.85 billion) in 2024.

Amgen is the current sponsor of the Irish Open which will be at US president Donald Trump’s Doonbeg golf resort in September.