Oireachtas committee to hear talent pipeline for tech ‘under pressure’

The pipeline of talent available to the tech sector is “under pressure” with challenges for graduates and overseas workers relocating to Ireland, an Oireachtas committee will be told on Wednesday.

Technology Ireland, a division of employers body Ibec, is to appear before the enterprise committee alongside the IDA to discuss challenges facing the technology sector, in light of recent job losses at multinational employers such as Meta, Twitter and Stripe.

The business lobby group will warn the committee that a successful technology sector needs “access to a constant and frictionless supply of talent” that has been a “crucial ingredient” for Ireland’s success in the field.

“That talent has traditionally been supplied through two streams – the output from our third-level colleges and the flexibility and attractiveness of Ireland in accommodating overseas talent. Both these streams are now under pressure and therefore a strong response is needed to maintain a sustainable pipeline of talent,” the committee will be told.

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The lobby group will also call for the continued resourcing of the Data Protection Commissioner and the new Media Regulator as “crucial in order to preserve and protect Ireland’s hard-fought wins”.

It will warn “there still needs to be more co-ordination between the various departments, which are devising policies that are applicable to the technology sector” as it is split between various departments “each of which often has different priorities and different degrees of understanding of the nuances of the sector”.

The IDA, meanwhile, will tell the committee that the companies that recently announced job losses “will continue to operate in Ireland, many of them at a considerable scale”. It will say the job losses should be considered in the context of a period of rapid growth, but will also acknowledge that “we face a more complex and adverse operating environment” and that the inward investment agency remains “optimistic” about foreign direct investment’s role in the economy.

It will reiterate its concerns about “capacity constraints” in the Irish economy that “risk impairing the positive impact of Ireland’s FDI growth, citing housing, energy, water, infrastructure and planning as issues. “Continued action at speed and scale to address these challenges is essential if we are to successfully move to an internationally competitive low carbon, high-tech economy.”