Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To be fair, we are reviewing their position but they are a service within the local authorities. The local authorities have also put in a service and business development support. There are two players here. Enterprise Ireland is providing certain financial support but there are also the local authorities, which have been very useful in coming in with their expertise in planning and so on.

We will work with the local authorities to try to make sure that between us we have a good enterprise facing service. One of the things we have sought to do here is to have good collaboration with the local authorities. Some of the local authorities are great at putting more resources through this service because they see its value to their own rate base and ambitions and so on. I think this is a dynamic space. We are reviewing it and will try to improve it. We are doing it in what we think is a dynamic way, by requiring people to bid for money based on performance budgeting. They offer new performance and we offer money in support of new performance. That is what we are trying to do. We have put graduates into the LEOs and we have had some relaxation of the employment control framework and put some resource into LEOs so we are not sitting on our hands.