In Reply to: re: what infrastructure does the town need right now? posted by Ado on March 16, 2010 at 13:19:52:

I agree infrastructure needs to be improved - but the national development plan is currently spending €180bn over 2008-2013, that is over our current GDP levels. It is a huge infrastructure program and saying nothing has been spend is ridiculous.

On the FDI tables world wide.

From the CSO website

"The level of total FDI investment into Ireland decreased to €120,954m at end-2008 compared to €138,362m the previous year. This reflected a reduction of €6bn in the level of FDI equity/reinvested earnings to €175,428m combined with the impact of a significant increase of €11.5bn in outflows of other capital (mostly
loans) of €54,474m from foreign-owned enterprises in Ireland to their affiliates
abroad. Comparing the European region and the US, the changes shown for these two FDI components are different and result in different effects on total FDI movements for the two regions. Equity investment (including reinvested earnings) by European countries decreased to €122,860m - a drop of €5.3bn (mostly reflected by UK, Luxembourg, France and Germany, but partly offset by increased equity from the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland). This equity reduction, however, was exceeded by a decline of over €9.3bn in the level of other capital
outflows from foreign-owned enterprises in Ireland to their European affiliates i.e. from €31,438m at end-2007 to €22,088m at the end of last year. The effect of these opposing changes was to increase the level of FDI investment from European countries into Ireland from €96,705m in 2007 to €100,772m last year"

So please don't say there has been zero FDI into Ireland.

I personally don't see it as a waste, but not essential either. But for the amounts of money we are probably talking about irrelevant