Cork is the second largest city in the Republic of Ireland and the island of Ireland's third most populous city after Dublin and Belfast. It is the principal city and administrative centre of County Cork and the largest city in the province of Munster.
Cork's deep harbour allows ships of any size to enter, bringing trade and easy import/export of products. Cork Airport also allows easy access to continental Europe and Kent Station in the city centre provides good rail links for domestic trade.
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Cork City is at the heart of industry in the south of Ireland. Its main area of industry is pharmaceuticals, with Pfizer Inc. and Swiss company Novartis being big employers in the region. Cork is also the European headquarters of Apple Inc. where their high end computers are manufactured and their European call centre, R&D and AppleCare is hosted. In total, they currently employ over 1,800 staff. EMC Corporation is another large IT employer with over 1,600 staff in their 52,000 sq metre (560,000 sq. ft.) engineering, manufacturing, and technical services facility.
It is also home to the Heineken Brewery which also brews Murphy's Irish Stout and the nearby Beamish and Crawford brewery which have been in the city for generations. And for many years, Cork was the home to Ford Motor Company, which manufactured cars in the docklands area before the plant was closed. Henry Ford's grandfather was from West Cork, which was one of the main reason for opening up the manufacturing facility in Cork. But technology has replaced the old manufacturing businesses of the 1970s and 1980s, with people now working in the many I.T. centres of the city.
More recently Amazon.com, the online retailer, has set up in Cork Airport Business Park.
On 6 March 2008, developers announced a 1bn euro plan to create an Atlantic Quarter in Cork's docklands area to rival that of the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin making it one of the biggest and most ambitious plans undertaken in the history of the state |
