Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the work Enterprise Ireland is doing to increase exports from Ireland and to create jobs and commercial investment. I note that Enterprise Ireland client companies created 19,705 new jobs in 2014, but the net new job figures were half of this, at 8,476. This is the highest net gain in the history of the agency. Enterprise Ireland's end-of-year statement notes that its supported companies now directly and indirectly account for 300,000 jobs in the Irish economy. As the previous speaker said, this is 16% of the total workforce. The total direct employment in Enterprise Ireland client companies, full and part-time, stood at 18,072 at the end of 2014.

To contextualise the new jobs created by Enterprise Ireland, there are currently 349,500 people on the live register. This brings us back to the question from earlier about the targets for the next five years.

What are the agency's specific targets in this area for the next five years? The highest increase in sales and exports in the past ten years was recorded in 2014.

The number of net new jobs created is small when we consider the big picture. It works out at just over 2%. We need ambitious targets where significant increases in sales and exports deliver significant new job increases.

An issue of concern, which was not mentioned by the previous speakers but which has been raised on numerous occasions, is the regional imbalance in job creation. Has the agency specific plans to tackle that? The Government's Action Plan for Jobs 2015 refers to funding of €100 million to support and encourage regional stakeholders. It would be good to know what the job creation target is to match that additional funding by Government for 2015. It would be helpful if Mr. Sherry could shed light on that for the committee.

Some of the ASEAN, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, countries have questionable human and workers' rights legislation in place. They are wide open to abuse. Some of us were at the meeting with Ban Ki-moon and he spoke about some of the difficulties in some of the countries. How does the agency ensure that Irish trade with these countries is focused on enhancing human rights protections? It is a very delicate area. Is it partially based on fair trade provisions? Are there any obligations on companies to export and invest responsibly? That was one of the questions we asked the representatives of IDA Ireland when they appeared before the committee recently.

We have a weakness in our language skills. Many of our young people do not speak a foreign language and that is the position for a variety of reasons. English is widely spoken in many ASEAN countries. Are there supports available to improve language skills? What is the agency's relationship with the Department of Education and Skills? Does it make recommendations, particularly with respect to the universities, on a regular basis? Concern was expressed that some of the courses provided in one of the universities related to language supports and supports in the area of cultural norms would be closed. Is Mr. Sherry aware of that? How does the agency feed into that system?