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

The economy created 300,000 jobs last year. That is an extraordinary performance given some of the headwinds, uncertainty and pressures businesses have been under. The combined number of those jobs that relate to agency clients, whether IDA Ireland, Enterprise Ireland or the LEOs, equated to about 50,000 additional jobs. I have a note that breaks this down county by county. For all three of those agency clients, more than half of those jobs are outside of Dublin.

The Deputy is correct. Perhaps if we could give more precise data, the committee could be more targeted in its questioning and we could look at areas that might not be working as well as the ones that are. We constantly have to try to get better at this.

As for startups, a big part of the new enterprise strategy, which was published in December, sought to support entrepreneurship and startups more effectively and report on that, to help small to medium-sized businesses make the transition to become medium to large businesses, and to find a way of encouraging them not to sell out at that point but to grow and become international multinationals. This was a big theme in recent days during my visit to the US. The Irish talent in that part of the United States in the senior management of multiple companies is quite extraordinary. We would love to have those people here building businesses rather than them having to go abroad to do it. Nevertheless, I take all the points the Deputy made.

On the HPSUs, Enterprise Ireland's ambition is to increase the number of high-potential startups over the lifetime of that strategy, which is out to 2024, by 20%. It is funded and is aggressively going after supporting high-potential startups. Even so, I take the point that this is not about picking the top 50, funding them and making them work. A further 200 underneath that will probably need mentoring and support, and at times funding or links to venture capital, VC, or whatever the case may be, and I think we can get better at that. Other countries do this better than Ireland and we need to learn from them.