BEERG Newsletter - Ireland: Tech industry holding up

With St Patrick’s Day tomorrow (Fri March 17), there is interesting new data from the latest Irish Central Bank report on the Irish hi-tech sector. It estimates that that number of job losses in the sector announced over recent months is just over 6% of the new jobs created since the end of 2019. 

Over 37,000 jobs were added by ICT companies which grew two to three times faster than the Irish economy as a whole between 2018 and 2021. It also had huge knock-on benefits for other sectors accounting for 40% of the sales of administrative and support services in the economy.

The report calculates that even if all of the global percentage reductions in work forces announced by tech companies were applied to their operations in Ireland, this would still amount to just over 2,300 lay offs. This is equal to 1.4% of those employed in the sector. The actual number of confirmed lays offs to the end of February was 1,474. 

Employment in ICT grew by almost 30% since the fourth quarter of 2019 to 164,600 workers at the end of last year. The report finds most of these new jobs were in high-skilled computer programming. ICT accounts for just over 6% of employment but 12% of all income tax paid and 21.3% of corporation tax receipts.  Wages are high with the average ICT worker paying two and a half times the income tax paid by the average worker in the economy.