Áine Collins (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses to the meeting today. I thank Forfás for the great work it has done, in particular in the area of mentoring, on which I worked directly with it last year. It was very effective. I am really glad to see that entrepreneurship has finally made it onto the Action Plan for Jobs plan in a big way. That is a huge part of driving investment into regional development. I spoke to some business colleagues in north Cork yesterday about how to keep our regions and towns alive. Some interesting points came up about social enterprise, which is the responsibility of the Minister of State at the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Sherlock. That is a new buzzword in Europe. We could consider the co-op model with small offices and businesses. If the services are not provided in small towns, business moves to big towns. A social enterprise co-op model might help small businesses, which are a social enterprise, to get off the ground. We are developing something at the moment which might be a pilot scheme. When companies come into Ireland and want to invest where the market, skills and infrastructure are, it is very challenging to bring them down to the regions. We have to be realistic about that. It is a matter of getting them in and hopefully the effect will be felt everywhere eventually.

It is a bit harsh to say that the microfinance guarantee is not working yet. It takes a lot of time to get that out and for people to understand it. People have come to my office recently and talked about setting up business and it has been good to have information to give them and to be able to offer them choices that did not exist before. It is difficult but I hope that when the LEOs are up and running later this year there will be better distribution of information. It is hard to get the message out. The committee has often discussed this issue. Unless people listen and are interested they will not know what is available for entrepreneurship. I understand that there will be a change in mentoring under Action Plan for Jobs 2014. Does Mr. Murphy want to comment on that? I thank him for being here today.

When we were in Brussels we heard many compliments paid to the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and its team of civil servants, particularly for the work they did during the European Presidency. I relay those compliments to the witnesses and thank them.