I am pleased to inform the Deputy that IDA Ireland’s mid-year results, announced in July last, showed that foreign direct investment into Ireland was very strong in the first half of this year. In the first six months of 2013, there was an increased number of investments, with approximately 7,000 associated jobs to be created as companies implement and complete their investment plants. This trend represents a continuation on the strong performance announced by IDA Ireland at the end of 2012, during which year, in excess of 12,000 jobs were created by multinational companies. The 2012 results represented the third consecutive year of growth in net employment in IDA Ireland client companies.
Work in winning new investments has been continuing steadily in the second half of 2013 and, on the basis of the trends so far, I am confident that the targets set out for IDA Ireland in the Action Plan for Jobs 2013, of winning more than 130 new investments, securing €500m in R&D and creating 13,000 jobs in IDA client companies, will be achieved. Among the companies who announced job creation plans or fresh investment plans to date in 2013, were: Ebay, EMC, McAfee, Pfizer, Sanofi, Symantec, Zurich, Huawei, Yahoo, Facebook, Vistakon, Guidewire, Squarespace, Groupon, Qualcomm, Novartis, Nypro, AOL FireEye, and Deutsche Bank.
In terms of specific investments in County Donegal, employment data for the county will not be available until the 2013 Forfás Employment Survey has been completed. However, the county continues to benefit from investment by key employers such as United Health, Pramerica and Abbott Diagnostics who together employ approximately 1,500 people in Letterkenny.