Zuckerberg pledges hundreds of new jobs in Ireland

HUNDREDS of new jobs will be created at Facebook in Ireland, the Taoiseach and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg have announced.

Leo Varadkar held a meeting with Mr Zuckerberg at the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley and emerged afterwards announcing a raft of new jobs ‘in the upper hundreds’.

He will also announce another 100 jobs at a leading cloud communications company while in San Francisco.

The Taoiseach was given a tour of Facebook’s expansive headquarters in Silicon Valley before sitting down with senior company officials.

Emerging from the meeting, he said: ‘I’ve just come from a meeting with Facebook, and with Mark Zuckerberg the CEO, and they have confirmed they are going to expand their operations in Ireland.

‘They currently employ 2,200 employees and contractors and they intend next year to increase the number of people employed in Facebook by several hundred.’

He added that Facebook ‘are very happy with their operations in Ireland’.

He said that the new jobs would expand on Facebook’s existing facilities saying: ‘Facebook have operations in Dublin and in Cork, and they indicated that there will be several hundred additional roles.’

Gareth Lambe, head of Facebook Ireland, who was present yesterday, said: ‘We also recently announced that we are expanding the Clonee Data Centre which will keep construction crews busy well into 2020, further demonstrating our long-term commitment to investment in Ireland.’

Mr Varadkar is also set to announce a further 100 jobs at Twilio, a cloud computing platform.

The company will be expanding its existing headquarters in Dublin, and expects to employ 100 employees in marketing, sales, HR, legal, security, finance, support and engineering by the end of 2019.

Business group Dublin Chamber has welcomed the commitment by Facebook.

Its CEO Mary Rose Burke said: ‘Facebook’s commitment to Ireland sends a message to the rest of the world about our credentials as a business location.’