Word: irelands
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...nine years that Killeen has been the cajoling chief of IDA, more than 175 U.S. companies have started manufacturing in Ireland. Industrial investment, primarily from the FORTUNE 500 but also from Australia, Japan and Ireland's Common Market partners, is doubling every four years. The foreign companies' exports are rising even more rapidly...
...instructive irony that the country that was for so long at the bottom of the heap in job creation is now so close to the top. The country is Ireland; its method of generating employment is to lure private investment, mostly from the U.S.; and its Pied Piper for industry is a former Gaelic football and hurling player, Michael Killeen. He is a man of Donegal, that scenic but tragic county in Ireland's west that sent so many of its youth to America (including four of Killeen's uncles and aunts) because they could not find work...
Largely as a result, economic growth in Ireland this year will be Western Europe's highest: 6.5%. Unemployment is also a high 9% but bucks Europe's rising trend and is generally expected to fall to 4% in the early 1980s...
First, advises Killeen, make industrial development a national commitment, a cause that will attract the society's brightest minds. Every country has its high-spirited elite. In some it is the marines, in others the entrepreneurs or professors or civil servants. In Ireland it is the IDA, which gets its pick of the university graduates. After a few years they can parachute into richer jobs in business, but most stay because it is a calling...
Second, Killeen continues, give companies plenty of incentive to expand and export. Those settling in Ireland get government cash grants for building, training, research. Export profits are taxfree. Taxes on domestic profits are reduced from the normal 54% to 25% for companies that expand and create jobs. Says Killeen in his light brogue: "Corporate taxes in Ireland have been insignificant because, until recently, we didn't have much...