BARRY O’LEARY is to be next chief executive of the IDA. Mr O’Leary is currently IDA divisional manager in life sciences and ICT and he will take the helm at the industrial development agency at the end of this year, when Sean Dorgan steps down.

IRELAND’S first ‘innovation voucher’ was presented to Applied Thermal Imagery, by Enterprise, Trade and Employment Minister Micheál Martin in Cork yesterday.

DUNGARVAN, which lost almost 400 jobs last year, has only received one IDA site visit over that time, new figures show.

INTERNET giant Google has confirmed that it will add over 600 jobs to its Irish workforce.

JOHNSTON PRESS, the Scottish newspaper group, has splashed out more than €240 million to become the largest regional publisher in Ireland with the takeover of the Leinster Leader Group and Northern Ireland’s Local Press company.

DELL, the world’s leading personal computer maker, is to set up a research and development centre in Limerick that will employ 50 people within four years.

BERTIE AHERN’S promotion of his former partner Celia Larkin to the interim board of the new National Consumer Agency (NCA) is hardly a bad hair day for him.

MEATH and Wexford are in for a jobs boost with an American financial services company planning to create 500 new jobs in the counties, but the employment situation in Galway is not so bright.

A MAJOR policy switch from foreign investment towards developing home-grown entrepreneurs is expected later this week, with the launch of Enterprise Ireland’s new strategy on Wednesday.

IRISH smokers bought 55 million fewer packs of 20 this year - mostly as a result of the smoking ban.

Junior Enterprise, Trade and Employment Minister Michael Ahern has said that the 2% increase in Ireland's exports in the first nine months of this year highlights the importance of EU markets.

The Government tonight dampened hopes of more tax cuts after pointing to "a significant moderation in the pace of growth" in a revised forecast of this year’s economic progress.

Ireland was hit by its third jobs blow in three days tonight with the announcement that the Irish Ispat steel-manufacturing works in Cork are to close with 400 redundancies.