Manage Preferences<\/a><\/p>\n“We look at the figures of people employed by US multinationals in Ireland – it’s 245,000 people now, that’s up from 210,000 a year,” he said. “So this is a story of growth. It’s a story of companies wanting to do more.<\/p>\n
“So we have to stay ever vigilant of the skills availability and make sure that we look at investing in homegrown talent and also encouraging talent from abroad,” he said.<\/p>\n
Another top concern for businesses is the shortage of housing, and Mr Sweetman said the upside of this was that Ireland was able to address these issues to maintain competitiveness.<\/p>\n
“When the dust settles, improving our own competitive advantages will be the single most important issue that impacts our long-term economic growth,” he said. “They’re challenges of success and ones we have full control over.”<\/p>\n
However more global issues – including the potential disruption caused by changes to tax policy, tariffs or trading relationships – were also top concerns identified by businesses.<\/p>\n
Mr Sweetman said this underlined the need for Ireland to focus on addressing the shortcomings it had control over.<\/p>\n
“What we’ve seen in our conversations with companies, from our surveys, from engagements with networks, is that it’s the national competitiveness agenda that is of concern and will affect their growth,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Being positive about this, is that the competitiveness agenda is cutting through. The work of the Accelerating Infrastructure Task Force, Government plans, billions in extra infrastructure spending,” he stated.<\/p>\n
“Because of these activities, the view of Ireland as a destination to invest in has improved over the last months,” he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The vast majority of US multinationals with operations here are still positive about Ireland as a place for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-447951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}