Comprising counties Carlow, Kilkenny, Wexford and Waterford, the region has made great strides in recent years. IDA Ireland currently has 86 client companies employing 15,301 people directly, with a 43% increase in jobs from foreign direct investment (FDI) over the past 10 years. The region has won investments across several key sectors including life sciences: biopharmaceuticals, food and medical technologies; international financial services; technology; and engineering.
State investments in infrastructure have played an important role in facilitating this growth, including the M9 and M11 motorways, along with the Waterford ring road and suspension bridge, and the Rose Kennedy bridge connecting Wexford and Waterford.
Combined, this investment has enabled talent mobility within the region; Kilkenny city is now just 30 minutes’ drive from Waterford city and Carlow town. The region as a whole now benefits from enhanced onward connectivity to other parts of Ireland, with journey times to Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports shortened significantly: a key point of attraction for busy overseas executives.
As this major infrastructural investment has been delivered, we’ve correspondingly seen a lot of inward migration into the region. The Southeast’s population grew by 8% in the inter-census period between 2016 and 2022, to 456,000 people. Within this, the population of Waterford city and suburbs grew by 12.3%, making it the fastest growing of Ireland’s five large urban centres.
Continued investment in infrastructure
And the growth trend looks set to continue. The Irish Government’s national planning framework (NPF) has designated Waterford as a ‘regional city of scale’, which means it will benefit from continued major investment.A new bridge, to be installed in early 2025, will significantly change the shape of the city, opening it up to further development and growth.The flagship Waterford North Quays regeneration project, currently well underway, is one of the top ten projects included in the NPF, which will see more than €400 million invested in road and infrastructure works, affordable housing, hotels, office and retail space.
The Southeast’s attractiveness to talent is also helped by a range of amenities that appeal to people who enjoy a mix of the cultural, the urban and the outdoors. These include the region’s superb 147km coastline, which is longer than the Netherlands and Belgium combined, with numerous beaches, river valleys and villages.
Education meeting industry needs
A major milestone in the region’s development was the formation in 2022 of South East Technological University (SETU), through the merger of Carlow and Waterford Institutes of Technology. SETU has 18,000 students across three campuses, making it a major hub for talent development and it plays a pivotal role in enabling the growth of many multinationals across key sectors.SETU degree courses include nine-month internships built into the curriculum, creating an attractive talent pipeline for companies. The University has also collaborated with numerous IDA Ireland clients in designing and developing courses, to ensure its graduates are fully skilled and ready for the modern workplace. The feedback we hear from existing and new clients about this is that they see this as genuinely unique.
In an ambitious move, SETU, supported by the Department of Further Higher Education and Skills, acquired the 37-acre site of the former Waterford Crystal factory in 2024. It plans to transform this into a new university and enterprise quarter, aimed at bringing companies and researchers closer together.
Fostering close collaboration between research and industry
The first building on this site, a new 10,000 sq m Grade-A office building, is almost complete. SETU is also constructing a new engineering and ICT academic building, and is planning a health sciences building to accommodate its recently won pharmacy and veterinary degree programmes.SETU’s record of working with companies is really impressive, and I’ve seen this first hand in meetings with multinationals that are evaluating the region as a base of operations. The extent to which the university has built out the talent pool to support companies in multiple sectors is impressive, with a collaborative approach that has led to developing training programmes and curricula that directly meet the needs of industry partners not just in the region but further afield.
The Southeast has many large-scale life sciences and medical technology manufacturing operations. Among the leading names are Abbott, which recently opened a new 30,000 sq m facility in Kilkenny. When fully operational, this site will employ 800 people. Others include MSD, Bausch & Lomb, West Pharmaceuticals, Amgen, Teva, Jabil Healthcare, and the French pharma giant Sanofi.
A track record in life sciences and medtech
Sanofi is one of the largest companies in the Southeast with more than 1,000 employees on site. It’s been in Waterford for over 20 years and continues to grow its workforce and activities, leaning hard into innovation and advanced manufacturing technologies.Education options in the region aren’t limited to University graduate roles: Waterford City’s enterprise training board is serving a broad employment base by investing in purpose-built clean room sites for training people in a range of roles in biopharma manufacturing, such as operations and packaging. This allows people who are working in other sectors to reskill in months.
Moves like this ensure the talent pipeline continues to increase even as foreign direct investment is rising across the Southeast. As well as sectors like biopharma, pharmaceuticals and medical technologies, other companies are active in financial services, technology, and international business services.
Financial services, powered by technology
There is a strong financial services cluster in the Southeast, anchored by firms like Unum, SunLife and State Street. Fund management and insurance are at the core of these operations, and much of the sector’s recent growth in the region has come on the back of expertise in technology and cybersecurity. Some of the companies in the region date back two decades. They also enjoy high levels of staff loyalty, with many people staying at the same company for a long time.
In March 2024, the company officially opened its 65,000 sq ft state-of-the-art office building in Kilkenny. This is now home to State Street’s global cybersecurity centre; a real vote of confidence in the technology sector in the Southeast.State Street is an excellent example of an IDA Ireland client that has continued to grow over a 20-year period.
There are two things worth remarking on here: State Street is one of a growing pool of companies that have chosen to locate strategically important cybersecurity sites in Ireland to protect their operations from cyber risks. Other companies in sectors like pharmaceuticals have also chosen this approach, and are using Ireland as a base for these vital business functions.
Secondly, State Street is so confident of sourcing the talent it needs that it chose Kilkenny, outside potential locations where many leading pure-play cybersecurity brands have traditionally set up. State Street made a point of referring to the region’s “exceptional talent pool” at the company’s investment announcement. Not long after that significant win, UKG, the largest privately held software company in the US, revealed it would create 200 jobs in the Southeast. It’s yet another endorsement of what the region has to offer.
The Walton Institute has been another key factor in technology investment in the Southeast. Formerly known as TSSG, Walton is an internationally recognised centre of excellence for technology research and innovation. Named for Ernest Walton, who won the 1959 Nobel Prize for splitting the atom, the centre’s expertise spans communications networks and mobile, IoT, machine learning and AI, augmented and virtual reality, and molecular communications. It has completed hundreds of projects with industry partners and has spun out multiple startups.
Engineering the future
The region as a whole can also call on a strong heritage in engineering, with a tradition in agricultural engineering activity across Carlow, Wexford and Waterford. That’s reflected today in sites like Sulzer in Wexford which is a centre of engineering excellence and includes research and development (R&D) as well as manufacturing and testing facilities. The site marked its 50th anniversary in Ireland in 2023.
IDA Ireland also supports manufacturing investments through its Advanced Building Solutions. There is now a third such site in Waterford; construction is complete on another in Carlow, and we are currently working with Wexford County Council on the advance planning permission for an Advanced Technology Building in the town of Enniscorthy. These investments greatly shorten the timeframe for investors to scale rapidly.In the Southeast, there’s been a strong growth in engineering companies like STS, Weltec, Suir Engineering and others, which now provide services to many of the multinationals in IDA Ireland’s client base, providing the expertise needed to build data centre facilities or pharma manufacturing plants.
With the Government’s announcement of Designated Marine Area Plans, we anticipate further opportunities for engineering around sites like Tonn Nua, the 900MW offshore wind farm that will be anchored to the sea floor off the coast of Tramore.
Working together to drive investment
It’s an exciting time for transformative projects like this, not just on a regional level but a national one. They will involve multinationals and local partners which is why we at IDA Ireland are actively engaging with all our stakeholders in the region: local authorities, education providers, chambers of commerce and industry groups. Foreign direct investment is a team sport. We have to work together to inform, enable and motivate everyone to address the needs of current and future investors.With a strong and stable base of multinationals, local supplier support, enhanced infrastructure and high-quality talent, it all adds up to a warm welcome for companies expanding their operations in Ireland, or those seeking a base here for the first time.