Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Regarding regional enterprise development and what IDA Ireland, the regional property programme will see 19 advanced building solutions delivered in regional locations across Ireland during the lifetime of IDA Ireland's current strategy. Three buildings have been constructed. They include an advanced technology building for Monaghan, an advanced technology solution for Dundalk, an advanced office building for Sligo and Digital Manufacturing Ireland in Limerick, which was formerly known as the advanced manufacturing centre. It is a national strategic initiative to support the Irish manufacturing base to accelerate and adopt digital technologies across its value chains. Not only is it buying land banks, it is putting strategic buildings in place in parts of the country where we believe this is justified and necessary with regard to balanced regional development but also in strategic areas that will attract private sector interest. I am glad to say that it is working. IDA Ireland is on site in four buildings due for completion at the end of the first quarter of 2023 in Carlow, Limerick, Waterford and Athlone. The next phase of properties in the programme is under way, with planning secured for properties in Athlone, Sligo, Galway, Mullingar and Cavan. Two properties in Letterkenny and Drogheda are being prepared for the planning system. The remaining four properties in Kerry, Longford, Oranmore and Castlebar are dependent on successful site selection, along with the appropriate design, planning and procurement. There is a rolling programme at different stages of development.

That is what the funding is for. Members will note that there are no sites in Dublin and Cork. That is because of the strength of those parts of Ireland in attracting foreign direct investment from a historical point of view.

IDA Ireland's approach to remote working is guided by the national strategy for remote working and the ongoing initiatives in this area by my Department, among others, in the delivery of Future Jobs Ireland and the Department of Rural and Community Development's new rural development policy. The agency is engaging with clients to identify opportunities to promote the uptake of remote working with a view to supporting regional job creation and so on. In the meetings I have had in the past few days, every company talked about remote working. For technology companies or pharmaceutical companies that are in a competitive environment, to attract skills it is simply a reality now that part of the consideration and mix is facilitating flexible working or remote working. The number of office buildings we visited where people were working there two or three days a week but working from home on Mondays and Fridays or Mondays, Fridays and Wednesdays was interesting. It is totally different from where we were a few years ago when the emphasis was on building large clusters of skills and people in high-end offices and so on. In fact, some of the companies we met have whole divisions that are based on remote input. There are managers for different sectors of the business in the head office and then a manager who is managing the remote section of the business. It is being factored into business planning now in a major way. That is no different in the public sector. In my Department and in the Department I have just come from it is the norm that people would be asked to be in the office two or three days a week and then work from home for the rest of the working week. A number of the companies I have been speaking would also sometimes allow people to work remotely for three weeks of the month and then come in for the fourth week. That is to get people sparking off each other, particularly where there is a need for new design, creativity or whatever. An awful lot of software engineers are simply working from home and then they come and meet whenever the teams need to. This is the new reality.

Everyone I have spoken to, whether Departments or large companies, is experimenting with this at the moment and trying to get the balance right between attracting talent and offering flexible working arrangements to support quality of life and family-friendly work policies while, at the same time, trying to maintain productivity and competitiveness. It is the new economy and we need to get used to it. It is brilliant for Ireland because it allows people to work in Dublin city centre while living on the Dingle Peninsula. If someone is good enough at what they do and is contributing to the company, remote working provides that flexibility. However, there are dangers to this because someone could also be working for a company in Dublin city centre while in the south of France. The internationalisation of remote working is a risk and that has all sorts of knock-on consequences in ensuring workers rights, workplace standards, taxation and a whole range of other issues. A lot of companies, particularly multinationals, are trying to get their heads around how all of this comes together. Make no mistake: remote working and flexible working are here to stay. It is a question of how we manage it in a way that keeps Ireland competitive and ensures workplaces, whether at home or on a factory floor, can work for the companies concerned.

Regarding the new construction centre, the updated housing action plan includes as a priority action 13.1 to "Define and commence the Construction Technology Centre’s work programme", which is now complete. A medium- to long-term research programme has been defined by the centre, which will engage with industry challenges arising in the delivery of Housing for All targets and more broadly with the national strategic outcomes defined in the national development plan. In simple terms, this is our top universities working together to try to make sure we are at the sharp end of innovation when it comes to building houses that are the right quality and can be built faster and in a more efficient and sustainable way. We need to build between 40,000 and 50,000 houses per year indefinitely. We need to be using the best materials and, where possible, we need to construct properties off-site and then crane them in and assemble them on-site. That does not require as many people. We can build energy-efficient modern homes that are warm, of decent quality and consistent with all the regulations that are required and we can do it faster. We need our universities to help us get there. That is essentially what this is about. We need to help fund that as well.

We are making good progress on the gender side. I mentioned some of the targets earlier such as Balance for Better Business, which Deputy Stanton was very involved in. I think he chaired the committee that agreed to get that project under way. It is working and it is a credit to him that it is because it is delivering quite impressive results in increasing the percentage of women in positions of influence in business leadership in Ireland.

We need to talk a bit more about the role of the LEOs because their role is now expanding beyond companies of ten people or fewer. They can now engage with companies of up to 50 people. That is a big change for them. It is going to open up enterprise supports for an awful lot more companies that do not qualify for EI mentorship and grants and so on. There have been calls from this committee and others to set up an agency to fill that gap between LEOs and EI. What we are doing now is expanding the remit of LEOs and I think they are able to do it. They have shown the capacity to do that. The Deputy asked how the additional €4 million in funding will be allocated between the framework and the small firms investment in energy efficiency schemes. That is part of the work of the LEOs are doing now. We will probably put more and more money into local enterprise offices. They are going to get bigger and bigger as operations and will probably grow faster than Enterprise Ireland or IDA Ireland, which also need to grow. There is a gap in supports for those companies that have fallen between the stools of EI and the LEOs in the past. I would be interested if the committee has views on this. If it wanted to produce a report or anything we would certainly look at that in a very constructive way.

I know the Amgen site well. I drive past it all the time. It is frustrating. All I can say is that I have spoken to IDA Ireland about it because it is such a strategic national site. It is not just a Cork thing. We are as ambitious as ever to try to get a big project there. A portion of that site is being used as an electricity converter station, linked to the interconnection with France, but here are still approximately 140 acres or so on that site right next to the main road. It is a gem of a site and we will do our damnedest to get a super industry in there.

I was going to say we have lots of sites around the country but we do not have a lot of sites of that scale in locations as strategic as what has become known as the Amgen site. Amgen has a big presence in Ireland, just not there. We will continue to try to get the right fit for that site.

If we can get a company that wants to move into that site, I think the road infrastructure will probably move quickly. It is a little like what happened with Kerry Group's headquarters in Kildare, where the State put road infrastructure in place to facilitate the scale of that site. One of the ways of getting the road infrastructure moving quickly would be to have a company that wants to spend hundreds of millions of euro or maybe more on developing that site, and the State would have to do its bit in terms of road access to make that happen. I can contribute to that debate through working with IDA Ireland. If we could get that interest, I think the road infrastructure would follow.