Lilly investment in Limerick is a ‘huge signal’ to biopharma sector
BUSINESS leaders across the region have hailed the “significant” impact of Limerick’s latest IDA-backed investment.
Biopharmaceutical company Lilly announced it is to open a new manufacturing plant at the Raheen business park in a move which will bring 300 permanent jobs, and 500 construction roles, the latter over a three-year period.
With a €400m investment, Lilly joins a suite of biopharmaceutical companies in the city, including BD in Plassey and Regeneron, which arguably began the trend by moving into the former Dell manufacturing factory in 2013.
Regeneron started with 300 staff almost a decade ago, with its head count now numbering more than 1,400.
Speaking of Lilly’s investment, the Limerick Chamber chief executive Dee Ryan said: “This is significant. It really is a huge signal to other people in the sector that Limerick is a location they should look at across Europe. It's a real signal Limerick is a location which needs to be given serious consideration for other biopharma firms considering investment to Europe.”
Raheen will be Lilly’s second location in Ireland, after Cork, and company executives over the weekend said it is the distance between the two cities which helped Limerick win the investment.
Ms Ryan said this makes the M20 even more important now. “We need to make it easy as possible for other companies to see us in this way,” she told the Limerick Leader.
Conor O‘Connell, the southern regional director of the Construction Industry Federation said: “It's a further example of inward investment in the region creating construction work and it's indicative of the construction sector to perform for the multi-national industry for a prolonged period of time. This ability to perform both nationally and internationally has led Ireland to be an exemplar and location of choice for the pharma and lifesciences sector.”
Lilly is set to seek planning permission for the facility from council planners shortly.
Mr O’Connell said he hopes it gets through this process “in a speedy and expeditious nature.”