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Investigates Investigates Money Diaries Daft.ie Property Magazine Allianz Home Magazine The 42 Sports Magazine The Journal TV Climate Crisis Cost of Living Road Safety Newsletters Temperature Check Inside the Newsroom The Journal Investigates The Explainer A deep dive into one big news story Sport meets news, current affairs, society & pop culture have your say Or create a free account to join the discussion Advertisement More Stories The CEO of Carelon in Ireland, John Shaw, with former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at a business awards ceremony in 2023. Tech jobs in trouble Hundreds of workers at IDA star client in the dark on redundancies one month on Over 300 staff are waiting to hear their fate over a month on from the multi-national saying it may pull out of Ireland. 12.06am, 17 May 2025 Share options THERE WAS A BUZZ in Carelon in March, the company’s annual ‘All Hands’ event was happening on Thursday, the 27th, in Limerick city, and every one of the 300 staff members had been offered a hotel room in either The Strand or The Savoy – surely a sign that things were going well. Not that anyone was worried. In 2024 the company carried out a recruitment drive for 100 additional personnel, and in the financial year ending 2023, it posted profits of €226 million. Then on Monday before staff were told the event was canceled. Panic ensued – everything had been booked, it would cost the firm thousands to cancel. By Wednesday redundancy rumours were swirling. When Thursday itself came around, staff were invited to a Teams meeting with a man most were not familiar with – Rajat Puri, the President of Carelon Global, which is part of Elevance Health, one of the biggest health insurance firms in the US. Within fourteen minutes he explained to them that the company was considering pulling out of Ireland altogether. No questions were taken – nothing was put in writing to staff who weren’t working the day of the call. “A colleague of mine who was off at the time read about it that night in the papers, he sent me an article link and said: ‘Is this true?’, I had to tell him it was, like, that he’s probably going to lose his job,” one employee told The Journal. Over a month later, after a 30 day consultation period ended on 6 May, the staff have still not been given a formal notice of redundancy, or even been told if they are in fact being made redundant. “Hysteria would not be an exaggerated way to describe how people feel at this stage. When management does face us, hundreds of questions are lodged on Teams, we get no clarity in return. “Some people are pregnant, expecting babies in the next few weeks, others have bought houses. The CEO, John Shaw, always told the media how proud he was that over 60% of our workforce are ‘new Irish’, as in from overseas. They have brought their families here, their kids go to local schools. Their visas depend on them having this job,” a Carelon worker said. The management forwarded an email to staff on 8 April from an official in the Department of Social Protection who said that the Minister for Enterprise had informed them that the company may be making all their staff redundant. The official asked that Carelon share a PDF from Intreo on how collective redundancy works. “Since then we’ve had nothing in writing from management that would tell us what is going to happen with our jobs. Irish management seem to have very little information, and they can’t really explain to us why the company is closing down here. “They asked us to put together an employee representative committee, which had a €12,000 budget for legal advice, which has been spent. The consultancy period – in which the company is speaking with the IDA and the Government, expired the Friday before last, and we’ve heard nothing, but the company is refusing to provide any further funding for our representative committee,” one worker said. On Fridays in Carelon, management and staff take part in ‘ask anything’ sessions via an online call. “Two of those have been cancelled in the last month. One week the CEO actually said he was cancelling it because he had an important meeting, which we later found out was with the IDA. “It doesn’t feel like we, the employees, are the focus at all, but rather, the company is setting up the cleanest exit possible, and minimising its financial loss,” a worker said. IDA funding The Irish Industrial Authority (IDA Ireland) hailed Carelon setting up its Limerick HQ in 2021 as a boost to the local economy, and a sign that Ireland has become a destination for “top talent and investment in the healthcare sector”. In the financial year ending 2023, it provided the company with over €832,00 in Government grant money, having given the company over €375,000 the year before. Advertisement In 2023, the company, which was formerly known as Legato, won the overall award for best firm at the Limerick Chamber Regional Business awards, it was also named as the best employer. What does Carelon do? Carelon says that it provides “unparalleled information technology application support” in order to “make the world a healthier place”. The company’s CEO John Shaw says that the firm pushes “the limit of what is possible in healthcare technology by using tech to achieve “full and complete care”, and the CEO of the IDA has previously praised the company for its “innovative” research and development. The employees say that the client for Carelon Ireland is chiefly its parent company, and the majority of the workforce are helping Elevance to develop an automated system that will flag potentially fraudulent or frivolous health insurance claims made by customers. “We say that we offer healthcare solutions. Most of us in data each day are dealing with huge swathes of code aimed at automating how the company spots things that would invalidate claims – like overlapping dates, for example, it appears to be an issue for the company is that the intellectual property rights for those systems is with Ireland now,” a worker said. The company’s financial records show that its sales are wholly to related parties in the US. “We’ve been told by Irish HR that the reason for closing is financial, for operational simplicity, and so the parent company will have less sites to manage. That is seriously confusing and disheartening – we were always told by management that the company was offering a career, rather than a short term job,” an employee told The Journal. Political intervention In the Dáil on 3 May Sinn Féin TD Rose Conway-Walsh asked the Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke if he was working with management at Carelon to “explore alternatives” to layoffs, which she said would be a blow for the workers and to Limerick. The Minister said that the Government are “first responders” when this kind of difficulty arises, and added that Research and Development grants it provides “cement the next product line and embed the next level of patents and IPs”. He said that he repeatedly challenges the IDA on its risk profiling, and added that the IDA will be investing billions in R&D over the next five years. Carelon was asked for comment on Thursday and had not replied by yesterday evening. IDA Ireland has said it does not comment on client companies. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Support The Journal Eimer McAuley Send Tip or Correction Embed this post To embed this post, copy the code below on your site Email “Hundreds of workers at IDA star client in the dark on redundancies one month on”. Recipient's Email Feedback on “Hundreds of workers at IDA star client in the dark on redundancies one month on”. 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