Mr. Frank Ryan:

I hope Deputy Harris will find this helpful. The Action Plan for Jobs contained more than 270 individual actions to be delivered in 2012, spanning all Departments and 36 State agencies. The 270 actions were broken down into quarterly milestones. Enterprise Ireland had responsibility for more than 100 of these actions, representing one third of the action programme. Progress reports on the delivery of all milestones were published at the end of each quarter. Details of all actions delivered are available in these progress reports from the website of the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. The fourth progress report is due to be published shortly and will outline a number of actions which Enterprise Ireland concluded in the last quarter of the year.

A number of significant objectives were realised, including the launch of the second call of the innovation fund for Ireland, the development capital funds, support for a record number of high-potential start-ups, the establishment of technology centres such as in cloud computing and support for more than 200 significant company projects involving investments of more than €500,000. Enterprise Ireland delivered in full and on time the vast majority of the more than 100 actions assigned to it by the action plan. The precise amount was 97%. We are, of course, operating in a challenging environment with regard to resources and I can provide details to the committee on the missing 3%. We are looking forward to co-operating closely with the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation on the implementation of the action plan for 2013.

The actions have put an enormous strain on the resources of the agency. Over the last 18 months, 217 staff out of a total of 742 have been reassigned to new duties in order to meet the demands of our client companies and the requirements under the action plan.