IT consulting firm Accenture to cut 890 jobs from Irish operations

Accenture plans to cut around 890 jobs from its Irish operations, on top of the 400 staff let go earlier this year, both as part of a round of global job reductions announced in March, the IT consulting firm said on Monday.

The announcement represented one of the largest batch of IT layoffs in Ireland, which is the European hub for some of the biggest global technology firms.

Accenture is one of Ireland’s largest foreign multinational employers with over 6,500 staff. The 1,290 redundancies sought this year represent close to 20% of its Irish workforce and compares to the 2.5% of its global workforce it set out to cut in March.

Accenture said its business in Ireland continued to perform strongly and that it remained firmly committed to it.

Meta, Microsoft, Stripe, Google, Salesforce and messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter, have all cut jobs in Ireland in the last year, with Facebook-owner Meta also announcing a second round of redundancies in May to lower its headcount by almost 30% to 2,000.

Despite the cuts, employment in Ireland’s information and communication technologies sector grew 2.7% in the first quarter, data showed in May, helping to push the overall unemployment rate to a record low of 3.8%.

Ireland’s inward investment agency also expects the number of people employed by foreign-owned firms to increase this year after a strong first half, and that most of the job cuts in the tech sector were over. Reuters