On the face of it the claim, or threat if you prefer, by Israeli Ambassador Dana Erlich that the Irish tech sector might be impacted negatively by the state’s decision to recognise Palestine as a state appears pretty straight forward.
According to a report in yesterday’s Irish Independent she specifically referred to “Israelis who invest in Ireland and are concerned about their investment”, and “Israelis who have relocated to Ireland into different tech companies and either are requesting to be relocated somewhere else or asking to return to Israel.”
The Irish state currently has a net trade deficit with Israel – so we import more from Israel than we export to them. The deficit was around €4 billion in 2022. It has been reported that most of that is accounted for by tech services which companies based in Ireland import from Israeli companies. The import of electronic circuits from Israel cost $3.4 billion in 2022.
That does, in fairness, represent a rather large potential lever, although I imagine that the decisions to import are actually made by mostly American parent companies such as Dell and Intel with plants in Israel. That in turn, raises a different sort of potential threat to the Irish tech sector which I will return to shortly.
As for the Israelis who have “relocated to Ireland into different tech companies,” there are, relatively speaking, not that many. Since the end of the Covid restrictions on travel, a total of 726 work permits have been issued to Israeli nationals. Presumably they mostly do work, as do a huge proportion of other non-EU and EEA nationals who are issued with permits, for tech companies based in Ireland.
The number of Israelis who work in Ireland as reflected in the number of work permits issued is fairly small. Israelis were 16th in the number of issues made in 2023. Even if we assume that all of those were issued to tech workers that only accounted for 4.6% of the overall number of permits issued to companies involved in computer and component manufacture and information technology and less than 1% of all work permits.
Given that thousands of people come to Ireland each year to work in the sector – there were more than 15,600 permits issued to Indian nationals in 2022 a large proportion of them employed in tech – is it perhaps the case that the Ambassador was referring more to the possibility that US-based tech giants such as Intel and Facebook might take umbrage at the Irish government position on Palestine?
For ‘woke’ and all as these tech giants are in other contexts they do not share the Left’s position on Israel. Anecdotally, the word is that some of the large and not so large tech companies have actually been nudging employees at pretty senior levels to make it clear that they are on the side of Israel in this conflict. This is pretty similar to how the same companies have previously made it apparent that any deviance from the Californian Woke Party line on other issues was not smiled upon.
Will the same chaps think about “cancelling” Ireland in the way they cancel MAGA and TERFs and other acronyms that would have you quickly on your solar powered bike out of Menlo Park if your were to evince an even vague inclination towards such heresy over spritzers and bagels.
While one might rightly question the focus of the Irish political establishment, and that includes the opposition Left, on Israel as compared to their silence on China’s monstrous treatment of the Muslim Uyghurs for example, the implicit economic threat here is an interesting way to conduct international diplomacy.
Micheál Martin is right. The bombing of refugees in Rafah in a place where the Israelis themselves had “advised” them to go after their own homes were destroyed is barbaric. It is well beyond and out of proportion to the massacre that happened in October.
It is vengeance visited on people who are no more responsible for the savagery of Hamas than any civilian is responsible for the savagery of their rulers when they engage in barbaric acts. That certainly includes the rape of hostages as it does the bombing of defenceless children.