Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this important issue and I assure him that the Government is committed to rural Ireland and to making sure that it is vibrant and prosperous and a place that people want to live in, stay in, and move their families to and where they can establish successful businesses. Our plan for the nation, Project Ireland 2040, has rural Ireland at its heart. We want the cities outside Dublin to grow twice as fast as Dublin for the first time and we want 200,000 more people living in rural Ireland by 2040. I travel around the country regularly, as does the Deputy, and it is becoming more evident that there are very different rural Irelands.

The tourist towns are very different from the market towns. What may be happening in a small town can be very different from what is happening in another town. We have plenty of towns that are vibrant and are doing well and we have other towns that are doing very poorly, where one can see the empty shop fronts and derelict premises in the town square. It is very sad to see that. At the same time we see towns and villages that are doing extremely well. We know that in every county in Ireland, bar two, the population has increased in last five years, and in every county, bar none, the population has increased in the last ten. Even in counties one can see movements from smaller towns to bigger towns and from some areas to others.

At the centre of ensuring rural Ireland does well is making sure there are good jobs. Jobs allow people to stay in the community, move into those communities and create revenue that supports business in those areas. We have seen a dramatic reduction in the percentage of people unemployed in recent years, down from 15% in 2012 to only 5.6% now. In the Deputy's own county of Tipperary, very much a rural county although a county with many large to medium-sized towns, the number of unemployed has gone from 18,000 in 2012 down to 9,000 now. The number of unemployed has halved in the last six years, which is really significant. We have seen jobs growth in seven out of all eight regions, and in the year gone by, four out of every five new jobs created were created outside of Dublin.

We have seen some really encouraging job announcements - for example, Combilift in Monaghan. I was there to hear 200 jobs announced. Some 90 jobs were added in Burnfoot by E+I in Donegal. Netwatch in Carlow is another example. What is great to see about those companies is that they are Irish indigenous companies setting up in our small towns and going global. We need to see more of that. We obviously need to continue to bring foreign direct investment, FDI, into the country and continue to promote foreign investment, but we need to further support Irish companies that do well and can grow themselves.

On broadband, I think the Deputy makes a very valid point. It is important to bear in mind that when this Government, Fine Gael and the Independents, came into office, about 52% of premises in Ireland had access to high-speed broadband. That is up to about 75% now, and we are going to go the whole way so that we become one of the first countries in the world where every premises, no matter how remote, has access to broadband.

See this speech in context