Amid the doom-laden fretting over the impact of the tariffs announced last week by President Donald Trump, it would appear that the tech sector and individual tech companies most likely to be hit here had perhaps begun to slightly scale back their Irish operations, though that pattern is not evident elsewhere.
Of course, no one knew what the nature of the tariffs were going to be in advance but they had been well-signalled, and companies tend to factor such matters into their planning. If we look at the numbers of work permits issued since the beginning of the year, there is little indication that, in general, most companies which employ many people from outside of the EU were anticipating any significant change in recruitment policy.
In the Information and Communications Sector – which includes the big tech corporations based here – there was a fall in the number of work permits issued in March, a trend that had continued since the beginning of 2025 with the number of issues down by 18% on the same period in 2024.
That includes a fall in the number of permits issued for the first quarter for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tik Tok. It will be interesting then to see if that trend continues in April and over the next few months as the impact of the tariffs begins to be felt.
There was also a small drop in the number of permits issued for companies manufacturing chemicals and pharmaceuticals. That is one of the key sectors that it was feared would be hit by tariffs but attracted much less attention than was expected when they were announced.
However, while the pharmaceuticals sector was not specifically listed in the tariffs, it is believed that they will be applied to other sectors, including pharma, over coming weeks and months.
In anticipation of this, Gareth Sheridan, the CEO of Nutriband, said that he is anticipating a “drastic” reduction in global supplies of the sort of treatments, including antibiotics, which they manufacture here.
There was barely any change in the overall number of permits issued across all of the sectors, with 62 additional permits issued overall in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same period last year.
While some sectors witnessed increases in the numbers of permits issued, and others fell, there would appear to be little connection between those changes and the expected tariffs. Among those to see greater numbers issued compared to the first quarter of 2024 were Transport and Storage, Construction and Accommodation and Food Services
Twice as many permits were issued to companies in all three of those sectors. Construction is undergoing somewhat of a revival with higher targets for housing which raises the whole issue of importing workers from overseas to build houses for other people coming here from overseas. This is something that many are not keen to discuss when focusing on the growing demand for apartments and houses.
Accommodation and Food Services is an interesting one as it would not appear to correlate with the generally modest and even pessimistic forecasts for the tourism and hospitality sector. At the end of 2024, the Irish Tourist Industry Confederation (ITIC).was predicting that revenue would grow by between 5 and 7% but that the numbers of tourists coming here would see a more modest increase.
The ITIC last year pointed out that a huge number of potential tourist beds have been taken over by the refugee asylum accommodation sector. It will be interesting to see then how much of the current 7,000 new capacity they refer to in their December 2024 outlook will end up being similarly diverted with the consequent damage that will have on the tourist and related sectors.
It is also noticeable that there would appear to be an increasing number of accommodation and particularly food businesses which are themselves owned by non-nationals and which largely, if not exclusively, recruit their workforces from their own countries, often outside of the EU. It is difficult to see how this contributes greatly to the domestic economy and domestic jobs.
One of the largest beneficiaries of work permits for a workforce greatly made up of persons from outside the EU is the health sector. That has witnessed a notable fall in the number of permits issued in the first three months of 2025 compared to the first quarter of 2024.
While the sector still received the largest individual issue – accounting for over a quarter of all permits between January and March – that fell by over one thousand, a decline of more than one third, on 2025. Numbers coming from outside of the EU to work in agriculture also fell by 30% year on year.
None of the falls are related to any anticipated impact of the Trump tariffs except perhaps the tech sector. What the figures do show is that, while there has not yet been any notable increase in the number of work permits issued, the trend is upwards and that there are likely to be well over 40,000 permits issued to companies to employ people from outside of Europe in 2025.
Which says much about the nature of the economy in the Irish state and in particular the predominance of both overseas companies and workforces that are increasingly made up of people from overseas. We shall be returning to that theme.