Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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We have a service level agreement with each of the agencies. As Minister, I am always looking at the bottom line. The metric that I use is how many jobs are being created. We obviously want value for money. There are commitments in the programme for Government, such as the €200 million for IDA Ireland, to ensure they can create jobs in the regions. The commitment to create 200,000 jobs by 2020 with 135,000 of those jobs being in rural and regional Ireland is written in black and white. We are seeing that success come through. In 2016, 52% of jobs created by IDA Ireland were outside the Dublin area. Regional job creation by Enterprise Ireland was 64% of their total. I sometimes think the message has not gotten out there. However, 72% of all jobs created in 2016 were in rural and regional Ireland.

In reply to a recent parliamentary question, I outlined that I have had approximately nine formal meetings with Julie Sinnamon and Martin Shanahan, the chief executives of Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland. I still meet them probably once every fortnight. We are always discussing jobs. They sent submissions in to me before the budget. We looked at the position and agreed on a figure. They obviously want more money than is available but we ensure that they are well-resourced. I did very well to provide circa €52 million capital funding and €3 million current funding. We will continue to keep an eye on it.