Ms Joanne Grehan:

I will start by referring to Matt Molloy's pub also. Depending on when members were in the bar, I was one of the dancers at the back shuffling away.

The enterprise and investment unit has a broad and interesting brief. The county manager has assigned an ambitious and enthusiastic team to the unit. We have been very fortunate and a lot of hard work has been done over the year. The only measurement that we have been asked for is jobs, by which I mean the retention of jobs, support for jobs and jobs growth. To that end, we have networked ourselves in many different places and as far and near as we can. We have set up think tanks in different locations to challenge us to think better. The think tanks comprise members of the diaspora who have done extremely well in their chosen careers, and we have one in Dublin.

This year we have sustained jobs and the county enterprise board has done a lot of work. Our greatest success this year has been last week's announcement by Northgate Information Solutions from the UK that it intends to create 150 jobs in Mayo over the next three years, including 50 jobs in the new year and 100 to be rolled out as soon as we can deliver them and in partnership with the group thereafter. That was a great coup for the county, its people, the unit and the people who supported us. We are very excited about the news. The group will return to us next week to choose a location in the county.

Jobs are a key performance indicator. The delivery of new initiatives is rated against job creation in the short, medium and long term. That is why we see tourism as being so critical and central to what we do. We view tourism as enabling us to create jobs in the short term.

I shall outline the extent to which we are out and about in communities. We are a team of 12 people, including two interns supplied through the JobBridge programme. Therefore, we cannot be everywhere all the time. As the county manager has said, there are a number of pillars. Like everybody else, we would like lots of resources.

Communication is very high on our agenda. We communicate with all of our networks and communities and with the media. We have tried to ensure they hear us when we talk about the good things that happen in the county.

We work with every single agency and ensure they know everything about what we are doing. We bring them together and talk to them. They have all been invited to and been part of the welcoming committee for groups coming to many of the initiatives we have taken this year, including science and technology week, the national geographic project, the Brehon laws symposium and the Cuyahoga trade delegation, among others.

We have almost completed a three year action plan to identify the next generation of tourism product in County Mayo. We will develop the plan into an actual strategy taking on board Mayo Naturally Limited. Our tourism officer has been pulled in many directions because of The Gathering and in working with communities. There are strategic projects such as the Greenway. In this regard, we are extending the monasteries of the Moy greenway, the Turlough House to Islandeady greenway. There are other infrastructural projects such as the Wild Atlantic Way and the Spirit of Place project. Mr. Padraig Philbin is out talking to communities all the time. We now know that we need somebody to maintain all of these infrastructural projects and mobilise all of the tourism and hospitality providers and tour operators. We have a few new projects, including the Jackie Clarke Garden project, the proposed Mary Robinson centre and Ireland's first presidential library, with the exception of the Douglas Hyde centre in Roscommon. It is an academic partnership with NUI Galway and will be a global women's leadership centre. It is something Ballina needs to capitalise on its cultural projects. To answer the question: we need somebody else on the ground to work on behalf of all of these agencies to mobilise communities.