Ireland was at the centre of a very high-profile financial bailout in 2010 but it has recovered well and its AV sector is now booming, all thanks to foreign investment.
The Irish economy was a global success story during the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ years (1995–2007) due, in part, to very low corporation tax. However a property crash followed by the global financial crisis of 2008 sent the Irish economy into meltdown.
Since then it has recovered and economic growth is expected to be a healthy 3.5% in 2015, with another 3% of growth predicted for 2016, much of it led by exports. Which is very much the case when it comes to the country’s AV sector too.
"The AV market in Ireland is very buoyant," says David Carroll, the managing director of Dublin-based integrator Systems Video. "It’s very much multinational-led. One in ten jobs in the private sector in Ireland is with a multinational, and this is particularly true in Dublin, where there are a lot of large multinational technology companies who come in to Europe, to Dublin first of all, and then move on out."
Dublin has become a hub for technology and banking in the past decade, with scores of US companies setting up base, and it’s this foreign investment that’s pushing its AV sector forward.
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