Dublin has already witnessed a wave of foreign investment already this year and the latest to join the list is Qpass, the Internet payments company, which is to establish its European headquarters in Dublin and a data centre in the National Digital Park at the CityWest Campus. Although Qpass will initially have only a small presence in Dublin, with around a dozen employees, Bill Barnard, the company's managing director, said that it was hoped that by this time next year that number would have doubled or even trebled. He added that one of the major factors in the company's decision to establish their European base in Ireland was the help offered by the government-run Industrial Development Agency (IDA), which is at the centre of the thrust to attract e-commerce activities to Ireland. Barnard said 'We looked into a number of major European cities and the IDA were far and away the most responsive and helpful.'

Ireland accounts for a staggering fifty per cent of all pan-European call centres and it also has a large share of so-called shared services, where corporations pool their back office activities. Dublin has not surprisingly evolved as the main location, yet this week Cork received a boost as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Mary Harney announced that three US firms would be bringing over 250 new jobs to Cork in IDA-backed initiatives.

Global TeleSystems (GTS), a provider of e-business, Internet and telecommunications services throughout Europe, is to create 150 new jobs at a shared services centre which will be located at the Cork airport business park. Global TeleSystems operates Europe's largest cross-border fibre-optic network and its largest Internet backbone. In fact the company already has operations in Dublin and is expanding outwards. Ms Harney said the arrival of GTS in Cork was further proof of the city's ability to attract high quality overseas business to the region with IDA Ireland support.

Ms Harney also announced that Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide would create a further 87 new jobs at its Cork reservations centre over the coming months whilst US company Red Hat Software is to create another 27 new jobs in a software centre which is to be established in Cork. She commented 'The focus of IDA now is to have top names in skill-based international services companies locate in the regions and the last two years has seen real delivery of international names in a range of quality projects to Cork - names such as Siemens, American Bankers Insurance Group, Datastream, Pilz, Rand, Citco, Com 21 and Avery Dennison. The decision by GTS to locate here is further endorsement of this strategy.'