MORE than 500 new jobs will be created in Galway, Dublin and Cork over the next three years as a result of four separate in vestments supported by grant aid from IDA Ireland.
The 530 new jobs are in the electronics, software, healthcare, and services sectors, which remain the four key areas for foreign investment.
The largest project is the expansion of M/A Com in Cork a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania-based company AMP, one of the world's leading suppliers of electrical connection devices.
M/A Com, which currently employs 160 people, has an electronic component design and manufacturing facility in Cork. Its parent company, AMP, also employs 75 people at an electrical packaging facility in Dublin.
The Cork plant won the battle for the expansion programme in the face of competition from AMP's other European sites, particularly those in Britain.
In Galway, the US software company Data Dimensions has already begun to recruit staff for its new software development centre, which will employ 140 people.
The company will initially focus on providing software to help companies cope with the huge problem of millennium updating.
Computers use two digits to express years so that 1998 becomes 98 but, without special software, many systems will be thrown into confusion in 2000 by believing that 00 is 1900 rather than 2000.
Also in Galway, the British healthcare company Biocompatibles International will create 100 new jobs in a £2.5 million investment.
The British company bought the Galway-based Atlantis Catheter Company four months ago, and this will be the foundation for the new development.
The new plant, which will be located in a 20,000 sq ft factory at the Mervue Industrial Estate, will be the centre for all Biocompatibles' research, product development and manufacture of cardiovascular products.
ATI Technologies will create 90 new jobs in Swords, Co Dublin, at a new European customer supply, distribution and support facility. ATI makes video and three-dimension graphics products for use in personal computers, and had sales of $360 million (£226 million) in Europe last year.
ATl, based in Ontario, Canada, sells its graphics accelerator technology to most of Europe's computer and electronic hardware manufacturers such as Intel, Apple, Gateway 2000, ICL, and Digital.
