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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Well, don't take it bad.

Ireland has like 5 million people? How would it have/support an adequate university research system to support a top-tier talent?

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Ireland's per capita level of funding for research has been lagging badly behind the European average, though. It's really a cultural problem: R&D doesn't happen here, except in rare cases. It's not really down to the size of the population: in the 19th C we had Hamilton and Boole, the world's largest telescope in Birr, Grubb telescope manufacturing in Dublin, and the Titanic was built in Belfast in the early 20th C. But independence, for better or worse, saw the Republic kind of divesting itself of technological stuff—it didn't match the national image, and separating from the UK meant that the communication and exchange of technical knowledge became an exception rather than the norm.

So it even has to do with the protestant/catholic divide (science and manufacturing was something "they" did). It's a very painful story, and a lot of Irish tech people have a chip on their shoulder (narcissistic injury) because of our backwardness.

I would also argue that the successful way that Ireland has brought big companies to the country hasn't yet resulted in the spin off of benefits that the presence of such companies has had in other areas.

> brought big companies to the country

Unfortunately, these companies were brought over by accountants, not engineers..

In so far as, Ireland gave them an opportunity to target EU market (& tax deals) which meant their staff is mostly non engineering (customer service/finance/legal).

The big mistake Ireland made (back then) was not ensuring some of their core business functionalities _had_ to be present in Ireland (i.e. engineering)

A lot less new tech companies built by accountants and customer support staff compared to engineers.

Has Ireland really brought big companies to the country? Honest question. I'm only aware of big companies having their accounting department there for taxation purposes.

Apple set up their first base outside the US in Limerick, which now also boasts the likes of Analog Devices (Limerick was where the current CEO started out), who actually do a lot of design and manufacturing there. Dell also used to have a massive presence, mainly making keyboards and the likes. Also I think something like nine out of the top eleven pharma companies worldwide have manufacturing facilities in Ireland, mainly in Cork I believe.

These are just a few off the top of my head, but the history is really interesting. A good bit of it has to do with Shannon, which actually served as inspiration for Shenzen believe it not!

I've been tempted to write up this history for quite a while because it's not really well known, and even despite being in STEM myself was quite surprised when I found out Analog Devices actually do design and manufacturing here and were making chips for Apple and Waymo!

Google, for example, have over 7,000 staff in Ireland. I know of at least 9 buildings in Dublin it owns/rents.

Size is not all. Ireland, Norway, and Denmark, being small countries of similar population, all somehow managed to have a similar amount of nobel laureates than China or India.

You may be familiar with a certain Linus Torvalds.

Finland has a population of 5M.

Granted, he moved later, but that's a counterexample for the first ~30 years at least.

I read recently a survey about European wide research grants and we came bottom. Well outpaced by similar sized, smaller and/or less wealthy countries like Denmark, Finland, Estonia etc.

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