Tax Code
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-26
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James O'Connor (FF), Cork East

I appreciate the Tánaiste's response. Undoubtedly, the agencies he mentioned, including the IDA and Enterprise Ireland, have done great work. As Chairman of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, I commend them on the huge body of work they have done over many decades. Beyond politics and beyond what happens in this House, they are working diligently on behalf of the State across the world and that has to be commended. We have to come to terms with the fact that AI will change the world. It will change how people work. It will reduce the number of people in our workforce and we know that. We see it happening. We saw it with Meta recently and other companies that are starting to downsize their workforce.
Informally, some governments are already talking about a future, amazing to say it, without the income from PAYE workers. That is the level of change. If we look at the pioneering companies in respect of this, such as Anthropic and others, they have discussed the possibility that from 40% to 60% of the current workforce in the United States of America could be finding themselves in some way redundant over the next ten to 15 years. We need to take this seriously and look at the key risks to the economy in Ireland.

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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