IDA Ireland

Ireland's greatest civil servants!

Ask anyone squinting at Ireland’s jobs figures for a glimmer of hope in this irrational geo-political environment, and you’ll notice all roads lead back to IDA (Industrial Development Authority) - Ireland, homegrown bearer of good-news press releases, usually surrounded by a haze of PowerPoint smoke. While the Irish SME sector has spent the last two years curled up in a fetal position, the multinational folk, lured here by the IDA’s deft, velvet-glove diplomacy, has kept Ireland’s recent employment stats better than the global average. Since 1949, the IDA has operated with the single-minded zeal of a Labrador pursuing a tennis ball, chasing foreign direct investment and, miraculously, catching it, over and over, building a global reputation as the gold standard of “please invest in our country” agencies.

Ireland’s secret sauce, if we’re being honest, is a corporate tax rate so helpfully low it makes the rest of Europe mad with envy, bless our fiscally liberal little hearts. That, and an economic openness that borders on indecent. Nowadays, everyone agrees that a small island economy needs the global drawbridge down. However, back in the day (pre-IDA), Fianna Fáil and its bureaucratic allies in the civil service were intoxicated by protectionism, convinced that locking out imports would somehow spark an industrial revival. What arrived instead of an Irish Industrial Revolution was the old national reflex: departure. Not factories roaring into life, but suitcases snapping shut. Not smokestacks, but steamships. The great machinery of progress was replaced by a conveyor belt of people, funnelling steadily outward, mostly toward America. Across the water to Britain, anywhere that wasn’t here, which stubbornly remained itself.