Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

First, I welcome the Deputy's question. It is important to state, as I outlined to Deputy Pringle, that the 90,000 extra jobs have been spread throughout the country. Dublin has higher growth. The mid-east, which is Deputy Tóibín's area, is not one of the higher growth areas but the other two areas of high growth are the midlands and the south east. The Deputy correctly pointed out that the west and the south west are areas that need attention. As Deputy Tóibín is aware, we have adopted a policy of introducing regional enterprise strategies. We have already taken action. We are identifying advance facilities that we will put in place in key areas. Where regions are not doing as well as they could we will put in advance facilities, align them to other strengths of the region such as institutes of technology or clusters of a sector in order to attract inward investment.

We are also making available €100 million from Enterprise Ireland which will be allocated by means of competitive calls. It will be designed to encourage regions to come forward with plans for what they could do with the particular competitive strengths they have. There is very much an emphasis on start-ups. We want to see a higher rate of start-up companies, less failure among the start-up community and more scaling. We also want to see individual sub-sectors that have the capacity to grow, identified by the stakeholders within the region and actions put in place to drive those opportunities. Competitive funds will be available to bring those opportunities to fruition.

In terms of setting targets, the overall context within which I operate is that we have set a target of full employment by 2018. That is in or around 160,000 additional people at work. We will seek to get regional balance in the spread of that. We will look at all of the regions. As I indicated to Deputy Thomas Pringle, we must recognise strengths as well as weaknesses. The Opposition will always focus on weaknesses. That may be its job. There have been some very good regional performances by IDA and Enterprise Ireland companies, in particular in the south west, one of the regions Deputy Tóibín identified. The IDA has also performed very strongly in the west, another region the Deputy identified. We have a baseline on which to build. The idea underlying the bottom-up regional strategies is for everyone to get in behind certain strategic objectives for those regions and make them happen.

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