Mr. Gabriel O'Connell:

I will respond to a few queries about older people and the arts. In Monaghan we have provided a lot of funding for festivals through the Leader programme to try to bring the festivals together. We have many small festivals trying to buy IT and communication equipment and barriers. We effectively got them to pool together and start buying this material collectively, and they now move it around as they need it. These are practical measures.

The Commission for the Economic Development of Rural Areas, CEDRA, has spoken about the social economy. Forfás did a major report a number of years ago on the potential of social enterprise in Ireland and concluded that there was a potential to create 25,000 jobs in rural areas by 2020 which would have a particular impact on unskilled or semi-skilled workers and occupations that may have been displaced in the farming sector, etc., and a significant impact on social inclusion, health care, etc. While some funding is available through Leader and the social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP, for these areas, and we welcome that, there is need for a stronger framework from Government to support social enterprise. Social enterprise can be very useful in the creative arts.

To come back to Deputy Heydon's point on practical policy approaches, one of the big issues we find in a rural county such as Monaghan is graduate retention rates. We have the second lowest graduate retention rate in the country. We send very well-educated people to Dublin, Armagh and Dundalk for further education. We have a very good education facility in Cavan-Monaghan delivered by DCU. However, we find that when young people leave the county, we do not get them back, and in the context of sustainable rural communities, the more depopulated a county gets, the harder it is to maintain service levels. Regarding graduate retention, getting back to Mr. Byrne's point, we are asking if some stimulus could be provided to smaller SMEs that would incentivise them to hire young graduates. There is a method in America called intrapreneurship which places a young qualified graduate with a particular skill set into a small business that maybe needs to grow but is stuck. It gives that person the scope to use his or her expertise and skills, whether marketing or IT or whatever, and helps the small business grow and the young person create a job for himself or herself and maybe for other people. This would not cost an awful lot. Something along these lines was done by InterTradeIreland a number of years ago. Graduate retention is a significant issue because the loss of our best and brightest young people from rural Ireland leaves an imbalance.