Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I thank Deputy Conway for raising this issue. She is correct that the IDA had a record year last year, with 13,000 jobs and a net expansion of 6,000 jobs. It was the highest job creation rate in a decade and the lowest rate of job loss in a decade, and that pattern is being continued into the first half of this year.

The Deputy is also right in saying that the south east is an area that has not shared in that success, and a number of responses are necessary to try to reverse that. Part of the problem is that the pattern of IDA gains in recent times has seen a move towards very high end types of project and that has favoured the very large cities with very deep labour pools and strong and established centres. Undoubtedly, that has favoured Cork, Dublin and Galway. They have built bases in clusters and they are seeing the product of that. They act as magnets.

The challenge for us in Waterford is to seek to build an equivalent cluster of strength around the existing base within Waterford. As the Deputy is aware, I have established a south-east action plan in recognition of the particular structural problems in Waterford. We have got all the key agencies around the table, including the local authorities and the Waterford Institute of Technology, WIT. It is a question of identifying the competitive strengths and how we build those. We had a successful review meeting there recently as a result of which a number of sectoral opportunities will now be focused on, and we will seek to develop those. To be fair, WIT has a strong base in technology across telecommunications, pharmaceutical and ICT for us to build upon.

I have given a direction to our agencies to give renewed emphasis to the south east, and one of the products of that is that so far this year the number of site visits to the south east have doubled. Enterprise Ireland has had a competition for new start-ups, and I attended one of the sessions with the 20 individuals who were successful in responding to a competitive start fund. Enterprise Ireland is working intensively with those as high potential new start-ups.

There is no doubt that regional spread will be an increasing challenge because of the type of companies IDA Ireland is winning, and in trying to achieve a greater regional spread, IDA Ireland is now targeting emerging companies, not just the iconic names. It is now looking at companies that are considering their very first move out of, say, the United States to come to Ireland. We have had 11 of those so far and they will be much better prospects for getting regional spread.

The other initiative is ConnectIreland which, as the Deputy is aware, is being conducted with the assistance of a company based in the south east that is aiming to use the diaspora or anyone with connections to attract companies to consider Ireland. More than 200,000 companies come to Europe each year and most of them would not have Ireland on their radar because IDA Ireland would not be working at that level. An impressive example is that 3,500 Irish accountants are working in multinationals across the United States. That is a huge group of people whom we can use as ambassadors.

We have set a target for IDA Ireland of 50% outside of Dublin and Cork. It did not come anywhere near that in 2011; it was only 28%. This year so far we are showing much better. It is closer to the 50% target, although not quite at it, but I would have to admit that the south east continues to be a challenge. We are working on it. We have had a six months review. We will continue to have those meetings. We set targets that we seek to achieve, and we are examining the reason companies are leaving. By and large, it is not always a great guide. It is not that Waterford is doing something wrong. Companies reach the end of their cycle. I am not sure looking at those who are leaving is the best source of information. We are trying to examine the competitive strengths of the region and build on that. However, I will ask IDA Ireland to examine if there is a pattern to the companies which have left in the past two years to determine if there is a diagnostic from that on which we could build based on what the Deputy is suggesting.

See this speech in context