Austin, Ireland, and the Future of Global Tech with Siobhan Hanley from IDA Ireland

Well, it's interesting because as I do the math, that takes us almost pre-World War II and only 20 years or so after Ireland was an independent country as we know it today.

That was pretty forward thinking for that time to be that young of an independent, youthful, growing country to say, hey, we need that.

But if you look to today's numbers – there's about 5 million people plus who live on the Island of Ireland, including Northern Ireland, but there's 70 million Americans who identify as Irish and another 70 million around the world.

Does having that is the correct term.

I can't say the word disparate, disparate

diaspora

is, is having such a large diaspora part of what made Ireland attractive even back then.

Um,

yeah, I would certainly say it played a role.

Um, and even still does today, to be honest.

Um, I think there's always been a huge amount of goodwill for the Irish community all over the world where IDA does operate and where, you know, even to your point around community, community is very important for Irish people and Irish people support each other in businesses.

And we've seen a huge amount of traffic from, you know, Irish people who've done very well in companies in Ireland.

coming into leadership positions then at headquarters, which is really interesting to see.

So I think as IDA has grown, as the number of companies that we support has grown, what we've seen is the companies more and more so, and even more so today, are looking for stability they're looking for you know a business model that works for them to grow their business and i think what's really important for us is that it's a partnership so when we work with companies that you know would have started in many cases decades ago in ireland and those companies are continuing to reinvest in ireland and you know sometimes people say well you know how do you measure success and to us success is companies are continuing to make decisions to reinvest in ireland to hire more people in ireland to undertake more strategic work in Ireland and they're doing that because Ireland's worked and particularly in the tech sector, you know, we've worked really hard to have a very strong offering for companies that are looking to, you know, higher tech talent, that are looking to have a business model that's really successful for particularly even companies from Austin and Texas to actually grow and expand in the European market, which can look quite complex from here.

So having a partner that will, you know, navigate that complexity and have a really solid business model for you to grow in Europe is really important.

Well, and the European Union only came into existence late 80s, early 90s.

And since that time, Ireland has been one of the premier places that companies have wanted to relocate.

I mean, we can look locally.

Dell was one of the first companies after the EU was founded to come and open up manufacturing and their European headquarters there.

Apple, of course, famously went early on.

So I compare Ireland, and maybe I'm naive, I compare Ireland when it comes to luring tech companies to the EU, much like Texas has done a very good job of attracting tech companies throughout the United States to move their headquarters or open up facilities there because of pro-business stance, easy government to work with, and programs like IDA Ireland just makes it easier and paves a way.

Is that correct? Is that a good observation? Yeah.

I think, Tom, you've taken all my lines.

We were actually just speaking about that today already, where there's just such a good synergy between how Texas approaches business and how Ireland has done it.

And it goes back to when we look at how many companies are headquartering in Texas at the moment and just how the likes of Austin is just growing so fast at the moment.