Business and local authority leaders pool resources to promote south-east

KILKENNY business and local authority leaders have pooled their resources to promote the south-east to potential investors.

Invest Kilkenny has brought businesses like Glanbia, Diageo, VHI, State Street bank, Taxback.com and Oscar-nominated Cartoon Saloon under one promotional umbrella with Kilkenny’s local authorities, business parks and festival organisers. This concerted effort created an air of optimism at yesterday’s launch.

“We have worked very closely with our leading companies to see how best we can push Kilkenny,” county manager Joe Crockett said. “We agreed we had a lot to package together – the €1 billion M9 motorway, WIT’s newly launched National University of Ireland Maynooth’s Kilkenny Campus at St Kieran’s College, and the 3,500 graduates the region produces each year.

“The region has been given a new dimension, with new assets and resources. It is now an ideal place to locate for anyone from a micro-business to a multinational. We have a wealth of new companies offering internet support services, built around the region’s enhanced connectivity.”

Kilkenny is also home to Ireland’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Taxback.com founder Terry Clune. His financial services firm, which employs 700 staff, uses Kilkenny as the hub for its global business even though Clune has no personal associations with the city. He came to the city on a one-week holiday and stayed.

Terry Clune said: “Kilkenny may not be as obvious a location as Cork and Galway, but the local authority is progressive; the ring road is almost complete and there is a heavy emphasis on making it a nice place to live. That was key to us when we were choosing to come and raise a family here.

“From a corporate point of view Kilkenny is a very strategic base in the south east, accessible to Carlow, Waterford and Clonmel and a large number of students.

“Dublin is now just an hour away. Waterford is just 30 minutes away and I use the airport there quite frequently to fly to London.”

Other partners cited on the investkilkenny.ie website include Smartply, Banking 365, (WIT biopharma spinout) TSSG, and the Irish Patents Office.

WIT president, Prof Kieran R Byrne, said: “Kilkenny county manager Joe Crockett had great courage and foresight to see the importance of this strategy. The future can be of our own making, we can take a hand in our own destiny by investing in our intellectual energies and capacities to make not just a new Kilkenny and a new South East, but a new Ireland.”