Irish Examiner view: Assessing damage to Ireland Inc

Tech sector in trouble

The situation at Twitter appears chaotic with sacked employees being asked to rejoin.

Not so long ago, it seemed that the tech sector was an unbreakable, unstoppable, and invincible force. It does not look quite so imposing today.

With social network giant Twitter slashing jobs globally and in a seemingly arbitrary manner, with little concern for regulatory responsibility, and payments company Stripe also announcing workforce cutbacks, the Government is getting jittery that this country’s position high on the hog of the multinational tech sphere is in jeopardy.

There have also been reports that Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, is set to substantially reduce its 87,314 global employees — some 3,000 of whom are in Ireland — threatened by a ‘tech reset’ or a global economic slowdown among multinational tech companies.

The situation at Twitter appears more than a little chaotic — although seemingly in line with the modus operandi of its new owner, Elon Musk. The company is now reaching out to sacked employees to ask them to rejoin because their firing was “a mistake”. The requests to such dismissed workers suggest the process of firing them in the first place was rushed and disorganised, at best.

The Government, and Tániste Leo Varadkar in particular, as Employment Minister, need to display cool heads collectively in the face of this seemingly tumultuous and frenzied tech meltdown and its potential impact on foreign direct investment in Ireland.

Meta has been struggling for months against a tide of reduced income; its digital advertising revenue stream, which forms the bulk of its revenue, has slowed markedly while it has also invested billions in the emerging technology of the ‘Metaverse’, an immersive online world, just as the global economy has tanked and inflation hit the roof.

Mr Varadkar and his Government colleagues, along with input from the IDA and Enterprise Ireland, must quickly assess the potential damage to Ireland Inc and, without rushing to doomsday conclusions, gauge where we go from here.