Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I compliment both organisations on their record results in 2014. They made a huge contribution to the overall well-being of the State in recent years when we were in deep recession. If it were not for the activities of the IDA and Enterprise Ireland, with regard to exports and bringing in new companies and investments it would have been far more difficult for us to have survived an extremely difficult period. The success of the IDA and Enterprise Ireland was one of the differences between us and other countries in programmes, such as Greece, Portugal and Spain.

With regard to the specific issue we are discussing, which the Chairman raised, 32 seems to be a very small number of offices for Enterprise Ireland to have abroad. It also looks strange that Enterprise Ireland will have 55 redundancies. The question of Ireland house, and the degree to which various State agencies co-operate in co-location, is a live issue. There is much to be desired. This would involve the IDA, Enterprise Ireland, Fáilte Ireland and the entire tourist industry, and Irish multinationals such as ESB International. Much more could be done to maximise having a type of Ireland house throughout the world. That Enterprise Ireland has only 32 offices when there are almost 200 countries in the world, not to talk about the number of these offices which are in the United States, means we are spread very thinly. The end result is that three quarters of IDA activity is in the United States, from where three quarters of investment has come. The figure for Europe is 19% and it is 8% from the rest of the world. How is this being addressed to get a better balance? There is no doubt the United States is an absolute phenomenon with regard to the quality, degree and quantity of inward investment, but it shows up the other side of the coin, whereby the rest of the world is poorly represented. We have rapidly-growing markets and companies in the far east and Latin America. I would like to get a response as to why the proportions remain the same.

I do not know whether this question has been asked, but do we market the entire island? To what degree is Northern Ireland engaged with Enterprise Ireland and the IDA in terms of marketing the island and inward investment?

A question was asked about attracting business from abroad to regional areas. Under the auspices of the European Union we created a huge necklace of regional colleges which became institutes of technology, including in Letterkenny, Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Kerry, Carlow and Waterford. Surely it should be easy to put together a cluster of skills from each of these, and include counties which do not have institutes of technology, to market the regions to companies abroad. The Chairman pointed out certain counties receive little or no inward investment. Surely they could be attached to an institute of education in the vicinity to create a skill cluster and talent pool which could be marketed.

Is the Irish education system responding adequately to talent requirements? We are very heavily into the IT and financial services sectors in which many of the skills involved are fairly advanced. Is the system sufficiently geared to respond to employment needs? What percentage of people are recruited from abroad to service new investment coming into the country?

How is ethical investment dealt with? Does the IDA have a specific approach to attract to Ireland companies it deems to be ethical which deal with the Third World and have a particular approach?