Terry Prone: Fatten up the tax receipts with production of weight-loss drug

Vaccine factories could be speedily re-purposed for Ozempic/Wegovy production

Producing the weight-loss drug Ozempic in Ireland could boost corporate tax revenue from Big Pharma. Picture: Mario Tama/Getty

It is time for advance factories and a new acronym, as if we didn’t have enough of the latter. We’ll come to the acronym. But first (as they irritatingly say, way too often, on radio) the advance factories. There’s a hand up at the back. Yes? You’ve never heard of an advance factory, Emma? Of course, at your age, you wouldn’t have. Forgive me.

An advance factory was — and sometimes still is — a construction by the Industrial Development Authority (IDA), invented maybe 50 years ago. They’d buy up land around the country and stick these huge empty buildings on the sites chosen, landscaping the surroundings so the whole thing became a posh pre-ghost industrial estate.