While there was some indication that the number of work permits issued to persons from outside of the EU/EEA in the Irish state was on course to fall in 2026, the latest statistics from the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment (DETE) would suggest that they are on line to be higher than in 2025.
To the end of May this year, there had been 15,535 new permits issued compared to 13,471 for the same period in 2025 -up 15%. Were that average to be maintained then the total for this year would be more than 37,000 compared to 39,350 for 2024 which was a record year for the issuing of work permits here.
What is most of note is that the number of permits issued to companies in the Information and Communications sector which includes the major tech corporations based here is slightly up. There had been 1,594 work permits issued to the tech giants in the first five months of 2025 and that increased to 1,613 to the end of May.
There are a number of takes on this. Firstly, it reverses the trend seen in 2025 when there was a significant drop in the number of permits that were issued to the ICT sector. They had fallen by more than 3,000, or by just under 50% from the total in 2024.
The indications, as reported at the end of 2025 and as I noted here, were that KPMG, Ernst and Young and Deloitte were planning to reduce their graduate recruitment by 29% in 2026. This has been followed by actual lay offs as recently reported by companies including Meta.
Just two weeks ago, Meta announced that it was planning 350 redundancies in Ireland as part of a global shedding of around 8,000 of its total workforce.
It might come as a surprise then to find that Meta was issued with more work permits for people coming here from outside of the EU/EEA in the five months to the end of May than they were for the same period in 2025.
Even for the three companies mentioned above – Deloitte, Ernst and Young and KPMG – while the number of permits issued to them fell dramatically in 2025 compared to 2024 they appear to have recovered and the number of permits issued to them from the first five months of 2026 is just slightly down on the period to May, 2025.
2025 also witnessed a significant fall of 12,400 in the number of people employed in the ICT sector. Which represented a fall of 6.8%. That was a contributory factor in the increase in unemployment from 4% to 4.4% over the course of last year.
Unemployment again rose in the first quarter of 2026 to just under 5%. While these are historically low figures they are significant when particularly impacting on certain sectors and on certain age cohorts as has been identified in the Central Statistics Office figures on youth employment.
The most striking thing to emerge from the statistics is that the recovery in the number of work permits being issued can be set side by side with another sharp fall in the recorded employment figures for the Information and Technology Sector.
According to the CSO Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2026 employment in tech fell year-on year by 20,300 which represents a dramatic fall of almost 11% from the first quarter of 2025. The vast bulk of jobs were in computer programming, consultancy and related areas.
All of which can – and again it is something I have reported on before the impact and nature of the impact of Artificial Intelligence has become more generally recognised – be attributed to the seismic consequences of AI.
And yet while there were 20,300 fewer people employed here in ICT in Q1 compared to the same three month period of 2025, the big tech companies were issued with another 1,594 work permits to bring people to work here from outside of the EU/EEA. Which is not to count how many non-Irish workers they have taken on from other EU states who do not require a work permit to work here.
Manpower surveys referred to in relation to the tech sector have noted that employers are expecting a recovery in recruitment as the year proceeds. This, again, is not contradictory if we recognise, as has been documented here previously, that the vast bulk of the jobs which will be created in AI here will be filled by persons coming here from India and other countries outside of the EU.
Meanwhile, a Eurobarometer (571) survey on ‘Barriers for European SMEs in recruiting workers from outside the EU’ found that Irish small businesses were the most likely among companies in all EU member states other than Malta to have tried to recruit workers from other EU countries or from outside of the EU.
60% of Irish SMEs had tried to recruit workers from either within the EU27 (35%) or outside of the EU/EEA area (25%). The average for all of the other EU member states was just 26% with just 14% having tried to recruit employees from outside of the EU/EEA.
The statistics on language as a potential barrier to recruitment from outside of the EU are mixed but only 25% of Irish SMEs reported this as a disincentive. One of the reasons why it is not more so is of course that a large number of persons who come here under the work permits scheme are from countries such as India where English is commonly spoken in the cities and educational and work sectors.
The concerns which the Eurobarometer identifies with regard to “complex or lengthy recruitment process” are set to be addressed here by further loosening of the criteria for all manner of business to take in people from overseas and in particular from outside the EU.
In any event the survey found that Irish SME’s had one of the very highest levels of respondents who found it easy to recruit from abroad. The big tech companies have never found such difficulties, and while AI is already impacting on ICT employment here it would seem that this will not prevent their ongoing preference to recruit from outside of Ireland.