HOW ARE THE best young brains in Ireland approaching the country’s financial woes – are they jumping ship or flexing their entrepreneurial muscles?

Reports from Bloomberg suggest that Ireland’s young talent coupled with investment from foreign technology firms could offer the country the future it craves.

While IT alone will not draw investment back to Ireland, the innovative spirit of the country’s task force could help to inspire confidence abroad, the report suggests.

New startups like RendezVu, which offers a language course aimed at foreign students learning English could be the future for the country. Linda Richardson of RendezVu told Bloomberg:

If you turn on the news in Ireland at the moment it’s full of gloom and doom and cutbacks and recession – but there’s also a number of people there saying; Look, we’re not going to just give up… We still have lots of good ideas, we still have lots of good people working in Ireland and we have to work out way out of it.

The “one bright spot in an otherwise gloomy economic story” is Ireland’s IT sector; a young, educated workforce and low corporation tax attracts the big players in IT – with Google, Facebook, Ebay and PayPal all setting up operations in Ireland. (And many of these companies are now hiring.)

Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter – which doesn’t have a base in Ireland at present – hinted that Ireland could be considered as a location for the company’s operations in the future, saying:

I think [Ireland is] attractive to anyone looking to expand out into the world.

American investment is also beginning to flow again, partially due to confidence in the IT sector in Ireland. Dermot Clohessy of IDA Ireland told Bloomberg:

We’re seeing very strong decision-making this year, both from the existing client base that’s here and from newer, first time investors into Ireland – that’s very encouraging.

Frank Ryan of Enterprise Ireland added that he believed Ireland would be “bouncing back much earlier than people expect”.

Watch Bloomberg’s report here.

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