Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-26
============================================================

Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

First of all, I want to take the opportunity to welcome Deputies Daniel Ennis and Séan Kyne. I congratulate them on their election and have no doubt they are looking forward to being effective and productive legislators and, of course, diligent representatives of the people who elected them to Dáil Éireann. It is a great day for them and for their families. We hope their families, in particular, enjoy this historic day for the Deputies and for them.
In respect of employment more generally and the impact of AI and the decisions of certain tech companies, overall, we should not lose sight of the fact that our economy is continuing to grow significantly using GNI as our figure. Modified domestic demand is expected to grow by about 2.1% in 2026. It increased by 4.95% last year. Employment has been fairly consistent year on year. The payroll employee index is up 2.2% year on year, and we are close to 2.8 million workers. We have a very robust and resilient employment story made up of the SME sector as well as the multinationals but we can never look at them as an either-or. They are both inextricably bound together.
I was in Dexcom in Galway recently where a factory has been built that will accommodate 1,000 workers by 2028. At the moment, there are 300 workers there. What was interesting is that in an investment of about €300 million, Dexcom procured about €180 million of that locally through the local supply chain, although the figures might vary. In other words, there are lots of smaller companies that are able to plug into the Dexcom investment. I was at a Japanese pharmaceutical facility in Kerry recently and again it was the same story in terms of the clean room technology and laboratories. We now have companies at a calibre that can actually supply into very sophisticated operations.
While we do need to develop our SME sector, work with Enterprise Ireland on high potential start-ups and do better at scaling up companies, quite a lot of Irish companies have scaled up on the backs of having originally won contracts with a big multinational. Take, for example, all the companies that have supplied into Intel in Kildare. I visited the Intel site about two or three years ago in the midst of the next Fab being built. Nearly every Irish construction company was in there, with different companies doing incredible frontier-type solutions for Intel in terms of clean room technology and so on. We do have a healthy ecosystem but we need to invest more on the skills side as it is key to the AI issue. The skills round table, aiready.ie and the national skills observatory the Ministers, Deputies Lawless and Peter Burke, are putting together are a good solid response to what is happening.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:04+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-26