Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

This is about labour intensive work that needs to be done anyway. What we are doing is front-loading it to try to get some stimulus into places such as County Cork and elsewhere - Cork and Donegal are the two counties that seem to benefit the most.

With regard to energy, one of the good measures introduced by the last Government under the former Minister, Mr. Eamon Ryan, was a retrofit programme. While I was critical of some aspects of it, the principle is a good one. I expect that retrofit programmes in the future will be based on a "pay as you save" approach so capital injections from the State will not be needed. This is a stimulus initiative that will work and build on the good work that has been done in the past in regard to encouraging people to upgrade their buildings and homes, which is also very labour intensive work. There are many people with the skillsets to do that work who are currently on social welfare.

In my area of responsibility, the food sector is another example of a jobs initiative that will be rolled out over time. We are operating to a blueprint called Food Harvest 2020, which is a set of exciting targets put in place by the previous Government. However, the challenging element is how we put in place a road map to achieve the targets. What we intend to do in the food sector in Ireland, which is a growth sector and had €8 billion of exports last year, is to ensure that the figure for exports is €12 billion by 2020. There are plans to increase the volume of food production in Ireland by one third by 2020 and we intend to add value to that food product by approximately 40% by 2020. For counties such as Waterford, Wexford and Cork, this will probably involve doubling milk production so we can meet a national target of increasing milk production in volume terms by 50%.

There has been much media coverage in Ireland this week concerning food production, rural life and where rural Ireland is heading in future. I suggest that one of the main drivers for the economy in the next five years will come from rural Ireland, in particular from the 400 food companies that are supported by Bord Bia and are building exports to the tune of approximately €400 million this year. Even in recession this is an exciting story to tell about certain sections of the Irish economy, whether about the potential growth of aquaculture, fish processing in towns such as Killybegs, which I will visit in the coming weeks, or the traditional strong food areas in which Ireland is the best in the world at exploiting the potential in beef, dairy, lamb, and so on.

This Government will introduce a rolling agenda of job creation and economic stimulus of which this is but one instalment. It is being paid for by a very small levy on pension funds which have been very generously supported by tax breaks by previous Governments. Now we are recouping some of that money in order to reallocate it in a way that can inject stimulus at an early stage in the lifetime of this Government. We will follow that by a series of constructive and positive measures that will keep the momentum going.

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