In the past week I paid a visit to the Wyeth Pharmaceutical facility in Clondalkin on the outskirts of Dublin.
It is located on 90 acres of land and is the largest single investment by the company anywhere in the world. It also makes Wyeth the largest employer in the pharmaceutical sector in Ireland.
It is a model for the kind of investment Ireland has managed to get over recent years, and the kind of thing that we need to continue to do in the future. Wyeth is servicing both European and wider world markets through this facility, which covers basic production as well as high-end development and research.
The company employs over 3,000 people between its six or so operations around Ireland. Dealing with and planning for diversity within their own workforce is a key part of their human resource function. Nine per cent of the Wyeth employee base is non-Irish, with these coming from 22 different countries; the largest group is from the UK, followed by the USA, Poland, South Africa and Spain. Of the non-Irish employees, 12 per cent are in senior management roles, while in one particular area or category – that of principal scientist – they are 40 per cent of the total employee numbers.
The real challenge in terms of diversity is to get more companies and businesses in Ireland to start planning for diversity, particularly in small to mediumsized enterprises, in much the same manner as the larger companies do. Of course it is easier for large multinationals, with their huge payroll and resources, to work with and encourage diversity because it is directly linked to their bottom-line profitability.
My department is putting together plans to fund workplace integration initiatives, and it is hoped that this will not just be an issue of a customer focus for companies but also an internal human resource issue as well as the key to unlocking greater profitability and productivity at the individual company level. While at the Wyeth facility, I was asked to give an award to a non-Irish member of the staff.
Edyta Slowinska is Polish, a fully qualified engineer, and in Ireland for a period of eight years with her husband, who is also an engineer. It is quite clear that in the high-skill category, the immigrants who have come to Ireland through our membership of the EU are here to stay for the long term. The kind of earnings and job satisfaction that can be achieved in Ireland, as distinct from the situation in their home countries, makes it a no-brainer. The retention of these talented and highly skilled immigrants will be a major challenge for the future, not just for employers but also for the Government, so that our labour market functions in a way which supplements our effort to increase the value added content to what we produce by way of sophisticated goods and services.
