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

Deputy Tóibin fails to recognise what the Central Statistics Office, CSO, has confirmed on each occasion it has published statistics in this area. Unemployment, which peaked at 15.1%, is now down to 8.8% and is falling continuously. Under-employment has fallen by 33% in the last two years and is reducing rapidly. From the outset, our goal has been to shift an economy that became too reliant on the construction sector, which collapsed in a property bubble, by rebuilding it based on a solid foundation of sectors across all areas of enterprise based on innovation and exporting. That has been highly successful.

There are 135,800 people back at work. In the first three quarters of last year 43,400 new jobs were created, which is well ahead of our ambitious target of 40,000 for the entire year. The rate of growth of employment in the Irish economy is 2.9% on an annual basis. That is far faster than the rate in any other European country. We are making progress but I am the first to recognise that we must make more progress in reducing further the rate of unemployment and the rate of migration and in seeing people returning to work in Ireland. The Action Plan for Jobs 2016 is focused on that. It is a decisive shift from the first phase, which was recovery from a crisis economy. We set a target of 100,000 people back at work and we have comfortably exceeded that before the 2016 deadline. We are now entering a new phase where we have doubled the target by setting a target of 200,000 extra people back at work. This phase is all about implementing the medium-term plan that we set out in Enterprise 2025 and Innovation 2020. We have a strong record built on entrepreneurship, the regional enterprise plans and the innovation strategy. We will continue to work on delivering that.

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