I, for one, thought it was good news that Ericsson, the communications company, had decided to expand its activities in Ireland, leading to 600 new jobs in Dublin, Athlone and Cork.

I also thought it was good to hear confirmation of new jobs from international companies for Kilkenny and Longford. Deutsche Bank is expanding financial services in Kilkenny. An American company, Cardinal Healthcare, is reported to be about to set up operations in Longford, leading to 600 jobs.

Sometimes, I think I must be the only person who thinks this is a good thing, apart from the people who will get the new jobs. I hear the murmuring, sure haven't we enough jobs now? Isn't it going to drive up house prices? Isn't it going to drive up wages? Aren't local small businesses going to be crowded out? Won't it change our culture and our values? Some of the critics are handwringers who find good outlets in the media and politics.

Others are honestly, but unfortunately, unable to see beyond the shortterm and the difference between a crisis and a problem. Others are working off mistaken and outdated notions of what this country can aspire to be, and how our economy now works. Some on the left are fundamentally hostile to multinational corporations. Others on the left are fond of the general criticism of multinationals, but don't, illogically, include any multinationals providing jobs to members of their families, in their towns and constituencies. Except when the multinationals close, and they are baddies again.

Imagine if we no longer classified business investment decisions as foreign or indigenous. Would that make things clearer? Why should we feel any differently about job-generating investments by Ericsson and Deutsche Bank than by Baltimore and AIB. It is as much a problem if we are "over-exposed" to Irish companies as if we are over-exposed to multinational companies. It could even be a worse problem, if the Irish companies didn't manage to compete internationally. AIB and Baltimore, CRH, Smurfit, Iona and Kerry are actually multinational corporations, by their ownership and operations The largest company on the Irish Stock Exchange, Elan, is the least Irish of the lot. It doesn't matter.

Does the Pole who owes his job to AIB's operations in Poland look at AIB as a multinational? By the logic of our way of analysing and criticising, he or she has to. Every other person in the world, except an Irish person, should, by this logic, classify AIB and Baltimore as multinationals, and, with the help of left-wing nonsense, tar them with the same big brush as voracious, exploitative, footloose capitalists. And all this while we, uniquely, would feel good about them as non-transnational corporations. This is nonsense.

There is no national flag attached to an Ericsson job any more than to a Baltimore job. Even if you don't accept the abolition of the entire distinction between foreign and domestic investment, ask yourself does it make any sense, in a single European market, with a single currency, to regard an investment by a German company in Ireland as "multinational", as "foreign direct investment"? Whatever about issues of culture, identity and belonging, the EU is the home market in economic terms. Ericsson is not, for us, a foreign investor (even though Sweden is outside the eurozone).

There is no logic to the criticism of multinational corporations for their very multinationalism, while arguing on cultural grounds for the abandonment of the nation as the source of cultural, social and political identity. We cannot favour a more loosely-defined shared European identity, an inter-cultural or even multi-cultural social identity, without also embracing the economic side of internationalised living.

It is correct to conclude, as IBEC and ICTU did last weekend, that the evil of racism, which can be seen as a failure to adjust socially to internationalised living, could jeopardise continued economic growth, as non-Irish people are turned off working here. A next step, which I look forward to ICTU and IBEC embracing, is to recognise that a 44 per cent top rate of income tax is also a negative, a similar failure to adjust.

The left-wing criticism of multinationals is actually not a criticism of their multinational operating capacity, but of capitalism itself, and of business, large or small. There is a connection between an unwillingness to celebrate more business investments in the Republic and the sloganeering, street politics of opposition evidenced at the World Bank and IMF meetings in Prague this week. Both show a failure to work with globalisation, "to harness it to meet human needs", as President Clinton wrote this week.

Take away the word "multinational" and we are left with business investment decisions by companies that operate in more than one of what used to be self-contained economies. A small proportion of those decisions happen to affect us, usually for the good. Long may it last.

Oliver O'Connor is contributing editor at Finance and Finance Dublin. e-mail: ooconnor@indigo.ie