Ireland continues to perform very strongly in terms of attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). It is a significant achievement that there are now over 210,000 people employed in IDA Ireland client companies here. The fact that the IDA has surpassed its overall five-year target of 209,000 within three years is further evidence of Ireland’s success in growing both the level of employment and investment by multinationals in the country.
However, I recognise that global competition for FDI is increasing all the time, and we must therefore work harder than ever to retain and promote our competitive advantages and to secure new investment projects. That means improving, if possible, on our already compelling and attractive offering for multinationals to invest here. These include strong incentives for research and development, our stable and competitive corporation tax regime, the long established pro-enterprise policy environment in this jurisdiction and our country's highly-educated workforce. By reinforcing these strengths and others, I’m confident we will be able to continue attracting more investment by overseas companies for years to come.
From an indigenous investment perspective, increasing the scale and internationalisation of indigenous enterprise is at the core of the ambition of Project Ireland 2040 and of Enterprise Ireland’s strategy 'Build Scale, Expand Reach 2017 – 2020'. This strategy seeks to inspire more Irish owned companies to have global ambition and to grow the annual exports of client companies by €5bn to reach €26bn in 2020. To support the diversification of Irish exports to new markets, Enterprise Ireland also published a new strategy to assist Irish exporters increase exports in Eurozone countries by 50% by 2020.
