IDA Ireland chief executive Seán Dorgan starts the new year at full speed with several large investment projects already in the pipeline. Yet pleased as Dorgan is after the agency's "best year" since 2000, he has big concerns about the poor state of the road network and the ever-rising cost of electricity to business, writes Arthur Beesley, Senior Business Correspondent

In the seven years since he took charge of the State's main investment body, Dorgan has never changed the mantra that Ireland needs to improve the quality of inward investment to survive the onslaught of competition from cheaper economies. He admits to a little boredom in using the same language time after time, but says the strategy and its emphasis on regional development is paying off.

But if Dorgan says the Government and IDA Ireland are pursuing the right path, he claims certain big players on the international scene are plain wrong in their analysis of the Irish story. The EU was wrong to prevent IDA Ireland from handing out multi-million-euro grants to Intel, he says. Wrong too was the New York Times in its "misplaced" criticism in the US media of Microsoft's use of its Irish unit to cut its home tax bill by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Any description of Ireland as a tax haven for US business is out of order, he says. "It's just simply not true. It does not meet the criteria for tax havens. The OECD has very clearly set them out, so we're not a tax haven - we're a low tax jurisdiction.

"If we were a tax haven we wouldn't have double taxation agreements with all of the other countries. We would have secrecy rather than transparency in relation to our tax arrangements. We don't meet the criteria for tax havens."

IDA Ireland reported a net rise of 4,296 for 2005 in the number of permanent jobs it supported and said that 46 of the 71 multinational investments last year went outside Dublin. This included a net gain of 1,500 manufacturing jobs.

"What isn't very well understood or recognised is that the total output value of manufacturing in Ireland is 2½ times today what is was in 1995."

If that serves to dispel the notion that Ireland is no longer a manufacturing economy, Dorgan says the sector is now the domain of high-productivity industries. "At the level we're pitching at it has to be very much based on technical skills, technology, technicians, science and engineering skill, more and more of the manufacturing employment is of technicians rather than basic operatives. There is still very considerable scope for basic operatives, but it has to be supported by engineering," he says.

"The two things we particularly point out and that we're pleased about is the regional impact ... and we've also seen yet another step-change in the type of research and development activities that are going on with more and more of the leading companies doing really more valuable and more significant work in that area."

Big companies that increased their Irish presence last year included Internet search engine group Google, fund administrator PFPC International and financial services firm BISYS.

Another 25-30 projects of varying scale will come on stream in the next six months, Dorgan says. "We think it will be a good year. The pipeline as it stands at the moment is as strong as it's been at any time in the last number of years. We think there are some very good developments that will crystallise in the first six months.

"There is certainly sufficient interest and engagement by leading companies with Ireland for us to say that so long as we keep doing the right things, make the right sort of steps forward, with skills and interest and the business environment, we can continue to win a lot of investment."

It is a mark of full employment that Dorgan has been saying for some years that his body is no longer concerned only with the number of jobs it supports. "We would regard the net gain in jobs as not the most significant indicator at all. The most important thing that we have to do is to keep moving the activities that are in Ireland, step by step to a higher level so that Ireland is competing at the high-end with high-value jobs and supported by a very good world-class business infrastructure."

While Dorgan says the domestic regulatory system is well tuned to the demands of international commerce, world-class is hardly a description that fits the sometimes chaotic road network. "Our roads are still inadequate for our needs. Our roads are not yet at world class standard which is what we need to have to be competing at world class."

Persistent increases in the cost of electricity are another cause for concern. Dorgan has no time for the excuses offered by the ESB and energy regulator Tom Reeves. While they have blamed the rising cost of oil for a long line of electricity price increases since 2001, the first since 1993, Dorgan believes there is more to the story than that.

"The trend in prices over the last few years has been going in the wrong direction, strongly in the wrong direction, and we can see that it may go further in the wrong direction. So clearly, the way in which the market has been organised and the way the market operates is not satisfactory. We don't accept that it is all down purely to fuel prices and we think there is a serious issue which has to be addressed in ensuring that our long-run competitiveness in energy and particularly in electricity is addressed."

Dorgan is never one to back down from an argument he believes is right, so the Government can expect more of the same from a man who has no plans to move on from the IDA. "I'll be continuing for another while," he says.