A reply to a Parliamentary Question from Independent TD for Offaly, Carol Nolan, showed that in 2024 6,787 work permits were issued to persons from 111 different countries outside of the EU and EEA to take up jobs here in the IT and Technology sector.
The main countries of origin were India – which accounted for two thirds of the issues; China, the United States, Russia, Nigeria, Egypt and Pakistan. Interestingly, just one work permit was issued to someone from the United Kingdom to work in IT.
In general, however, people who live in the UK do not require a work permit here despite having left the EU as they are still members of the EEA.
In response to the figures, Deputy Nolan stated that “The obvious question that arises is this: what is the government doing so badly that we apparently cannot educate, recruit and retain IT graduates of our own. To such a level that we appear to have pretty much outsourced IT worker recruitment to every other part of the world. It is yet another indication that when it comes to attracting talent, successive Irish governments have catastrophically failed our young people.”
Another unquantifiable metric is the number of persons from other EU states who work in IT here although they must also account for a significant number of people who work in the sector.
The only clue to that is from EU figures published for 2023 which show that 10.15% of the overall workforce in the Irish state were from the other EU27 member states. A significant proportion of them are most likely employed in IT but there are no separate figures.
What is interesting is that a much higher proportion of the Irish workforce was made up of non-nationals in 2023 than in the EU overall – a proportion that the growth in work permits would suggest has increased in the 18 months since.
15% of the workforce across the EU27 (including the Irish state so the % is even lower for the other states) were from countries outside of the state in which they were working. The total for Ireland was twice that at 29.1%. Of that number, as we have seen, 10.1% were from within the EU while 18.9% were from countries outside the EU and EEA.
That is an extraordinary figure especially when one considers that a huge percentage of that number are working for overseas companies based within the Irish state – a supposition that has been backed by other research we have done in this area and is supported by other evidence.
In February 2025, the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment (DETE) reported that 7,030 new jobs had been created in 2024 by companies which had the support of the Industrial Development Authority, Enterprise Ireland and Údarás na Gaeltachta. These agencies facilitate Foreign Direct Investment.
The Industrial Development Agency in its annual report for 2024 stated that it had been “a record year for R&D” which is almost exclusively related to the IT and tech sector. This was projected to create 13,500 new jobs up to the end of 2029. The report also referred to 76,790 jobs which had been created with the support of the IDA between 2021 and 2024.
When one considers that IT and Tech accounted for the second highest number of work permits in 2024 at 6,787 a reasonable assumption would be – as we have already reported in relation to jobs being created in companies like Intel, Microsoft, Google and other giants – that the bulk of jobs are going to persons from outside of Ireland.
That is confirmed in relation to another successful sector, Chemicals, in which the Department reports that foreign companies created 1,307 jobs in 2024. 829 work permits were issued for companies in the Chemicals sector which would account for more than 63% of those jobs. On the basis of the numbers of other EU nationals employed here we might surmise that at least 75% of the jobs went to non-nationals.
If we look at the 76,790 jobs created by overseas companies between 2021 and 2024 and compare it to the number of work permits issued over the same period, we find that 126,601 persons from outside of the EU and EEA came here to take up jobs.
The number of permits more than doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone as the minor restrictions that had been placed on the importation of overseas labour were lifted.
The fact that the bulk of new jobs being created by overseas companies – and indeed increasingly in domestic sectors such as food and hospitality and healthcare – are going to persons from outside of the state is further confirmed by some of the big expansion announcements made by overseas companies recently.
Late last year American company Eli Lilly announced the creation of new facilities and jobs at Limerick and Kinsale. It was issued with 107 work permits in 2024 and has been issued with 33 up to mid-April this year. One of the major job creation schemes heralded by the Government in 2024 was that Microsoft were to create 550 new positions here over the next three or four years.
120 of those jobs were open for application from November last year. Since then, the company has been issued with another 63 work permits and since the beginning of 2024 they have been issued with a total of 246.
As Carol Nolan has pointed out, there are serious questions to be asked about a situation in which the Irish state is something akin to an Airbnb for overseas corporations. A state which seems happy to survive on the rent they are paid for the use of the premises rather than do as some of the founders of the state like Collins and Griffith and their successors such as Seán Lemass attempted and chart an independent path to economic prosperity for the Irish people.
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