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Government ‘closely monitoring’ tech sector after spate of job losses — Varadkar

Ireland cannot be immune from the slump in the technology sector, but there will be further growth here, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.

Mr Varadkar said the Government had not been given early notification of further digital job losses in the sector here but said the situation was being monitored closely.

Major Irish-based multinationals such as Meta, Twitter, Stripe, and Zendesk all announced a cull of their staff in the last weeks of 2022, raising fears of the country’s exposure to the sector.

“Obviously, the tech sector is downsizing internationally, we’re not going to be immune from that,” Mr Varadkar said.

“When it comes to tech companies, we are monitoring the situation very closely, we don’t have any early warnings at the moment of digital job losses. There have been a number [of announcements] in the past couple of months.”

He said a slightly more positive picture had emerged in the few weeks before Christmas than would have been the case six or 12 weeks ago.

“I know a lot of tech companies that are still recruiting, and that’s very positive as well. But it’s a situation that we’ll obviously be keeping under review,” he added.

He said he was certain that in the medium term to long term, we are going to see further growth in the tech sector.

“The future is digital. All of those technologies we’re going to see more of in the future, not less. And I’d certainly say to anyone who’s thinking of subject choices in school or thinking of what course they’re going to do, say, you know, consider science, technology, engineering and maths because there’s going to be more jobs in those areas , not less,” he said.

Asked recently about the potential scale of job losses, Mr Varadkar said it was more likely to be thousands than hundreds.

Central Bank of Ireland governor Gabriel Makhlouf said the slew of technology job losses in Dublin amounted to a “pause” by the sector globally following a period of rapid growth during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The comments came as latest figures showed the number of people in the State listed as employed in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector fell by 11,000 — or 6.6% — over the course of the third quarter, to 158,800.

Despite the job losses, IDA Ireland said job losses within the ecosystem of companies it supports remain at “historically low levels”.

Slightly more than 8,400 jobs were lost at the agency’s clients in 2022, it said, giving a net job gain of 24,019 for 2022 alone.

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