Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Under the Action Plan for Jobs, the Government has published an array of actions designed to ensure full employment by 2018. The plan also contains a suite of actions to promote entrepreneurship, to encourage people to start their own businesses and to help individuals with a viable business idea to access crucial start-up funding. These supports are of course available to all individuals regardless of their socioeconomic background. In order to facilitate easy access to such programmes, the Department has established a network of 31 local enterprise offices, LEOs, located within local authorities as a first-stop shop to access all Government programmes. The LEOs have protocols in place with the Department of Social Protection, SOLAS, the Revenue Commissioners and other agencies to ensure persons from all backgrounds can get the help they need in an accessible way. These include access to back to work enterprise allowances, minor support grants and secondary benefits for people who have been out of work. Services offered by the LEO network include training and mentoring of those whose business experience may be limited so that they can get appropriate support and guidance.

In addition, it supports applications by clients to Microfinance Ireland. This source of lending is specifically designed for persons who do not have easy access to the banking system. Local enterprise offices have a service level agreement with Enterprise Ireland which specifically provides for seamless access for LEO clients to other Enterprise Ireland programmes.

It is encouraging that we are seeing good growth in start-ups and in the ambition of people to start a business. There were approximately 18,000 new business registrations last year. One of the objectives of our entrepreneurship strategy is to see an increase in the number of people from what might be regarded as disadvantaged backgrounds and other under-represented groups who start their own businesses.

See this speech in context