Foreign Investment Flow Continues As Ireland Bucks Economic Backdrop
Despite the techlash besetting Dublin’s commercial real estate market, foreign investment into Ireland’s robust economy continues to drive real estate investment in high end manufacturing and research, according to direct investment agency IDA Ireland.
And after a number of major investments announced this year, there is no sign of the market slowing.
“We're coming off a decade of what I would call staircase growth in FDI investment," IDA Head of Regions, Property and Enterprise Development Denis Curran told Bisnow.
In 2022, IDA secured 242 investments and of those 103 investments came from companies investing in Ireland for the first time. For the first half of this year, it announced in July 139 investments, 52 of those new, with a combined employment potential of 12,000 jobs.
Curran said that, with IDA operating a national mandate and a “very ambitious regional development mandate” across the four-year lifetime of the current strategy, it is targeting 400 investments out of a total objective of 800 investments to be in regional locations outside of Dublin.
Overall, 54% of the employment achieved via IDA foreign investment projects has been located outside of Dublin so far, he added.
Curran pointed to a diversified portfolio across manufacturing jobs, technology and services and to IDA’s landbank, which has been used as part of the package to attract recent investment such as U.S.-headquartered medical device company Dexcom, which will make Athenry its first European manufacturing site; Eli Lilly’s proposed new biologics facility in Limerick; and diabetes care specialist Abbott’s new Kilkenny manufacturing site.
“There's many different reasons why these companies choose to come to Ireland. We've been in the life sciences and medical devices business for several decades now. I could say the same for technology, right from mainframe computing, to the boom in the internet to artificial intelligence,” Curran said.
With IDA Ireland one of the largest commercial real estate landowners in the country with around 3,000 acres, Curran said that this was an important selling point for overseas investors, because companies are looking for talent, expertise, infrastructure and the ability to develop specialised real estate.
“They are looking for office space, for manufacturing space, and for green field and utility-intensive sites. Combined with the private sector and working with local authorities, our supply of advanced building units ensures an adequate supply and choice of commercial real estate,” he said.
“There are multiple criteria and considerations when companies are carrying out their due diligence in any particular country, or location within a country. The No. 1 thing is talent. Can they get the people over the lifetime of the investment project? And we have a track record that is already established and scaled. And that gives new investors confidence,” he added.
Curran said that beyond pharmaceuticals, medical research and medical devices, Ireland was seeing an increasing pipeline of financial services firms, particularly in the area of technology development.
“We've won over 100 financial services-related projects post-Brexit. So in our key target sectors, we have a strong existing capability and a track record for these particular companies," he said. "They come to Ireland for the education system and the alignment between the technological universities in terms of output of STEM graduates, business graduates, technology graduates, with the jobs that are being created.”
