Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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A total of €1.4 million has been requested on the Vote to fund the economic planning and reform initiative aimed at equipping Ireland for an exit from the EU-IMF support programme. This €1.4 million has been distributed in four equal amounts of €350,000 to each of the four strategic programmes. We will investigate what reforms are needed across the economic sectors as well as policies relating to banking, taxation and broader financial services that may boost Ireland's economic capacity. This work will assist in the Department's efforts to build on the Action Plan for Jobs as we seek to create the additional jobs that are required in the economy by 2016 and reduce the unemployment rate from the current unacceptably high levels.

A project of this scale will require substantial resources. Work to deliver this initiative will incur costs in the following areas: commissioning of high quality research and analysis from leading research institutes and consultancies; costs of seconding experts to work on specific issues under the general direction of the Department; costs associated with co-ordinating and organising a major consultancy effort to include workshops and seminars by regional and sectoral interests; and travel costs associated with visits to city regions in Europe and North America where innovative and successful economic planning initiatives are evident. I think I spoke about this here before.

We will exit the programme at the back-end of this year. We have lived by the programme as have our civil servants before and since we entered Government. Members will be aware of how the programme works where so many aspects of work have to be done against a firm timeline. When we leave the programme we will not have that kind of discipline within our system any more. I want to ensure that because of more loose arrangements we do not lose impetus. We want to bring forward an economic plan to take us from 2014 to 2020 which will be quite specific in the early years where different tasks will have to be done, perhaps, against a looser deadline than the bailout programme involves.

Anyway, in developing that economic plan there are some costs and we are building them in this year. We have started the work on it already.