Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his response. He rightly said that the construction sector took a major hit because many, predominantly young, people went into various aspects of that sector. He referred to a fall in the live register in Kerry of 3,500 since then. Most of those 3,500 have emigrated. Most young people I know have gone to America, Australia and England to seek employment because they were all involved in the construction sector.

Much of Kerry is coastal and fishing ports such as Dingle, Portmagee and Fenit have also been decimated. I agree with what the Minister said about collaboration on job creation programmes. All of us should work together to try to bring investment into the county. We should do everything in our power to develop local SMEs and so forth to help to reduce further the problem of unemployment.

Peripheral regions, particularly coastal ones, suffer more. Places such as Donegal are faced with similar issues. There should be positive discrimination towards trying to bring potential investors into the county in order to address a blatant unemployment imbalance per head of population.

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