WuXi's plant in Dundalk: the manufacturing and research facility on a 26-hectare campus was the company’s first outside China, Photograph: Ken Finegan/www.newspics.ieThe manufacturing and research facility on a 26-hectare campus was the company’s first outside China, was supported by the Government through IDA Ireland and would lead to 500 highly skilled jobs, the Government said.
If it comes into law, as it seems it will, the act will prohibit US agencies not just from dealing with companies of concern, but from dealing with any companies that use equipment or services provided by a company of concern. It will, in effect, shut WuXi and the other Chinese corporations out of the US market.
Meanwhile, members of the US senate’s homeland security committee have, according to reports, received intelligence briefings that WuXi AppTec transferred a US client company’s intellectual property to the Chinese authorities. The nature of the IP or the identity of the client has not been disclosed.
The proposed US law will allow the intelligence services update legislators so that new entities can be added to the list of companies of concern. The aim, according to the act, is to protect against the “risk to national security posed by human multiomic data from United States citizens that is collected or stored by a foreign adversary”.
Davey would like to know what happened to the DNA data that was collected in Ireland when WuXi was involved in its collection here by way of Genomic Medicine Ireland. Genomic Medicine Ireland has changed hands several times since it collected the data and is now owned by a US company, HiberCell Inc. A request for comment from Hibercell met no response.
In 2021, when the EU introduced sanctions against an entity and people in China accused of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the Chinese introduced counter-sanctions against a number of European targets, including Merics. In 2022, the UN Human Rights Commission said the campaign of mass oppression and mass surveillance in Xinjiang may represent “crimes against humanity”.
The Irish State needs to develop an ability to make its own national security assessments in relation to foreign corporations but, in the meantime, it needs to listen to what it is being told by the EU and the US. “In terms of State institutions, the balance is wrong. The balance is very much focused on the IDA and the potential for investment. The focus on national security needs to be much more prioritised,” Burke says.