Taoiseach meets Mark Zuckerberg who confirms hundreds of jobs in Facebook in Ireland

Ireland has the largest Facebook office outside of California.

According to RTÉ, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has met with Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who has confirmed to him that the social media giants will be investing in hundreds of jobs in Facebook Ireland. As part of his trade mission to the west coast of the United States, Varadkar met briefly with Zuckerberg who confirmed that the creation of jobs will take place across a number of teams in 2018. Ireland's Facebook offices are the largest outside of California and currently employ around 1,600 people in its Grand Canal Square establishment. Although the number of jobs being created in Facebook Ireland is unsure as of yet, Facebook's Irish boss, Gareth Lambe, has previously said that a new property in Dublin's north docklands would have space for 800 additional staff. "Over the next number of years, if the business and platform continue to grow, we expect to continue to grow pretty substantially in Ireland," he said. "It's by far our largest footprint of any country in the world outside our Silicon Valley headquarters." Lambe also stated that Facebook as a business is growing at a pretty dramatic speed with a growth of over 50% year on year. "When you're growing users and business as fast as that, we [in Ireland] need to scale up. We've been very successful here in Ireland at delivering results for Facebook. So we continue to get investment." Varadkar is also due to meet the head of Apple, Tim Cook later today.