Diaspora project to ‘create at least 300 jobs this year’
The jobs will be announced over the coming year and the individuals who helped bring the jobs to Ireland are in line for a windfall of up to €150,000.
Mr Clune told the assembled Cork business leaders how he established his first business at the tender age of seven. He began by collecting fertiliser sacks and selling them to people who sold firewood at petrol stations.
“Tragically the business went bust when I was eight because a better see-through bag came along. People wanted to be able to see the timber in the bags. It was a valuable business experience to learn that technological [advances] are coming the whole time and you have to be on the pulse of what your customer wants,” he said.
Mr Clune’s eye for a business opportunity has never left him and following a summer when he was arranging work for Irish students in Germany, he discovered there was income tax to be reclaimed at the end of the summer.
This realisation and a fortunate meeting with a German tax official who had spent a summer cycling in Ireland led Mr Clune to establish taxback.com.
The website now employs 750 people and files 322,000 tax returns every year for companies and individuals around the world.
In his view Irish people are unique in their ability to make connections with the diaspora. Mr Clune believes we need to harness this power to bring jobs here.
Through ConnectIreland, if anyone links an expanding company to Ireland they will receive €1,500 per job that the company creates in Ireland.
“Imagine if out of our 50m diaspora, just 5,000 people introduced us to projects that created 40 jobs each. That’s 200,000 jobs and every office job created results in at least one coffee shop job, that could solve a major problem in the Irish economy,” he said.
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