Some of the mega American corporations that President Donald Trump apparently wants to lure back to the US also operate huge manufacturing bases in Ireland. They employ many thousands of Irish workers and pay large fortunes in corporation taxes to the Dublin government.
But understanding how the US multinationals operate their global supply chains raises questions about some of the more lurid commentaries that suggest Ireland’s prosperity faces an existential threat from any new Trump tariff onslaught.
The global factories run by semiconductor maker Intel and pharma giant Pfizer, on the face of it, fit the bill for operations that nativist Trump would want back in the US.
Intel was until recent years the largest computer chip maker in the world, and its legacy ‘Intel Inside’ advertising campaign attested to the chips that drove many of the world’s laptops. For its part, Pfizer became a household name during the Covid pandemic.
The two US giants between them employ up to 10,000 people in sprawling towns beyond the western arc of the M50 Motorway in Dublin. They run factories, a symbol of economic prosperity easily understood by Trump supporters, and in theory, are among the most exposed of US corporations here should Trump turn his ‘America First’ tariff and tax artillery on Europe.
Pfizer employs 2,200 people in west Dublin, part of the almost 5,000 staff working across all its Irish locations
Intel and Pfizer are only two of 950 US companies that employ 210,000 people across Ireland. Other major US employers, include the 6,000 jobs at Apple in Cork, 5,000 at Google in Dublin city centre, the 3,500 workers employed at Microsoft across sites in Leopardstown in south Dublin and in Belfast, as well as the 2,000 jobs at Meta in Dublin’s Ballsbridge.
As a sovereign government, Dublin has over decades shaped its tax and enterprise and education policies to attract an outsized slice of all US investments pouring into Europe. The success is borne out in the €39 billion (£32.5bn) the government collected in corporation taxes last year, an increase from 2023 even after stripping out the Apple tax-back payment, as the exports-driven economy boomed.
The most recently available figures show that in the first 11 months of 2024, exports of goods from the Republic to the US alone amounted to €67bn (£56bn) and accounted for over a third of total Irish goods exports. At €54bn (£45bn), chemical and pharma products from Irish factories accounted for the lion’s share of the goods destined for the US. By way of comparison, firms in the north export around €2.3bn (less than £2bn) of goods annually to the US.
Ahead of Trump’s election in November, the Irish News had analysed the exposure of the all-Ireland economy to potential trade wars. On the campaign trail, Trump had threatened to impose trade tariffs (since triggered) on China, and on Canada and Mexico (since paused). Most analysts believe it is only a matter of time before the EU and Britain are in his sights, despite some London media commentators bafflingly suggesting that Brexit Britain could cut a deal to shelter its weak-growth economy.
However, the Irish operations of Intel and Pfizer suggest the US multinationals are far from being paralysed by the threat of a Trump trade war. In truth, they have other concerns.
Intel’s first $1bn investment in Leixlip 30 years ago has since ballooned to $30bn, and the plant in Co Kildare has expanded into a mini-town in its own right. Along with a research facility at Shannon in Co Clare, Intel currently employs almost 5,000 people across the land.
But Intel has been dealing with other issues, not least in seeking to raise huge investments required to catch up with rival Nvidia and deliver chip sets for global data centres for the AI boom. The company last year raised $11bn in capital in an agreement with Apollo Global Management that effectively mortgages part of the future output of its so-called Fab34 expansion at Leixlip. Intel revealed in recent weeks it has paid a penalty for delayed construction of the Fab34 plant.
Down the M50 Motorway at Grange Castle in west Dublin, Pfizer employs 2,200 people, part of the almost 5,000 staff working across all its Irish locations. The plant is one of 37 pharma facilities that New York-based Pfizer operates around the world, including in Belgium, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore and the US.
Grange Castle during the pandemic played a part in Pfizer’s supply chain testing batches of the Covid vaccine.
Last week, Pfizer posted its latest financial numbers, but it was the potential consequences of the likely confirmation of Trump’s pick of vaccine-sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jnr as health supremo that was under the spotlight.
Not one of the US financial analysts quizzing Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla on the earnings call raised the potential for trade tariffs to hit revenues or profits of the pharma giant.
Eamon Quinn is at eamon.quinnbiz@gmail.com