On the hardware side Intel, Qualcomm, Huawei, HP, Analog Devices, Xilinx, Nokia Bell Labs and many more all have extensive R&D departments in Ireland.
On the software side, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google etc. all have engineering roles advertised currently on Linkedin.
For the software side, what are those R&D departments actually working on? Would you really say it's R&D and product development? From what I can see, both from my own experience and from job posts, most of the engineering jobs are themselves operations related (SRE, infrastructure, customer support). I wasn't saying we don't have engineering roles in Ireland, but what we do have are not prime roles in terms of the companies products and services, and we should be looking to grow beyond facilitating company operations.