Twitter to establish international office in Dublin

Twitter is to set up an international office in Dublin, joining several other companies including Google and Facebook and snubbing London and its Tech City hub in the process. 

The Republic of Ireland is an attractive base for tech companies because of the significant tax breaks on offer.

"We are absolutely thrilled that Twitter has decided to establish an international office in Ireland," said Barry O'Leary, chief executive of Ireland's Industrial Development Agency.

"Twitter is a fantastic addition to Ireland's dynamic digital media cluster, and we are excited to support the company's continued international growth."

At the time of writing, Twitter had not confirmed the establishing of an Ireland office base, and had not responded to V3 requests for confirmation.

Twitter's job board currently offers 150 vacancies, but none located in Ireland. V3 recently reported on the shortfall of IT skills in Ireland as the country's high-tech economy flourishes.

The micro-blogging site does not usually discuss statistics, but did recently celebrate reaching 100 million active users worldwide.

Twitter has staff in the UK, and the team would have expanded when the company bought Tweetdeck in May, although the numbers of UK employees and users have not been disclosed recently.

The most recent figures were published in 2009 by NeXt Up Research, which said that Twitter had 70 million UK users respresenting 8.2 per cent of the total.