The Bookseller reports new appointments at the HarperCollins Dublin offices, as part of the planned doubling the size of the HarperCollins operation in Ireland.

The new appointments are Nora Mahony as an assistant editor reporting to publishing director Eoin McHugh, and Jacqueline Murphy as sales executive.
See The Bookseller OP for more on these two.
Of particular interest to TNPS was the confidence in the Irish marlet shown by some of the HarperCollins team.
Key accounts director Tony Purdue talked of,

a brilliant year with our bestselling fiction.

Eoin McHugh said,

This is a buoyant time for publishing in Ireland. At HarperCollins we have acquired many outstanding books and authors, and have an appetite to sign more, particularly in fiction and narrative non-fiction.

While CEO Charlie Redmayne said,

We are already delivering on our ambition to build on our established list of bestsellers in Ireland and these appointments will help the Dublin team grow its publishing programme in one of today’s most vibrant book markets.

TNPS reported on HarperCollins’ Ireland plans last November –

Ireland a “thriving” and “hugely important” book market for HarperCollins. Here’s why


and it’s worth reminding ourselves of some of the TNPS analysis highlights from that post:

With a population of just 4.7 million the Republic of Ireland sold an impressive 10.9 million books last year to the value of €130.9 million. That of course is according to Nielsen BookScan, so by no means the entire book market.
Of the €130.8m in sales last year just 24.3% (€31.8m) were Irish-published, which of course means over 75% were imports, safe to say almost all from the UK and US.
And that will be a key reason why HarperCollins rates the Ireland market so highly.
Across Europe Norway, Slovakia, Denmark, Croatia and Finland are all comparable in population size, but each requires expensive translations, both for imports and exports.
Ireland on the other hand, as an English-language market, can receive imports from and make exports to the USA, UK and Commonwealth countries with almost no changes bar perhaps some co0ncessions to British/American English spellings.
No surprise then that HarperCollins sees Ireland as a market worth investing in.