I HAVE WORKING NOTES from conferences I've attended during the past 20 years (like the one pictured in this blog post) that depict Ireland as a country with two separate nodes of productivity. There's productivity in the indigenous sector and there's productivity in the multinational sector.
Ireland's FDI workforce (the multinational sector) is very productive. In the 8 February 2019 Irish Times, Goodbody economist Dermot O'Leary writes about two economies in Ireland, "hyper-productive foreign multinationals, while the indigenous sectors have lagged significantly behind".
[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology.]