Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this matter.

During February and March of this year, I launched nine new regional enterprise plans to 2020, which build on the very strong progress made on employment creation under the Regional Action Plan for Jobs 2015-2017. I am pleased to say that implementation has commenced in all regions. Shaped from the bottom up by regional stakeholders and overseen by my Department, the new regional enterprise plans complement national level policies and programmes emanating from the top down, and there is strong alignment with Ireland's national enterprise policy, Enterprise 2025 Renewed and Future Jobs Ireland 2019.

The principle behind the regional enterprise plans is collaboration between regional stakeholders on initiatives that can help to realise the region's enterprise development potential and add value to the core work of the enterprise agencies. These stakeholders include local authorities, the local enterprise offices, the enterprise agencies, the regional skills forum, tourism boards, private sector enterprise champions, higher and further education institutions, business representative bodies and others. County Carlow is part of the new regional enterprise plan for the south-east region, which also includes counties Kilkenny, Wexford, Tipperary and Waterford. The regional steering committee for the plan, chaired by Frank O'Regan, formerly of Bausch & Lomb, Waterford, has already met to commence the plan's implementation.

There are five strategic objectives in the south-east plan, with a focus on County Carlow as part of the south-east region. These include building enterprise resilience; marketing the region; a regional engagement strategy on key infrastructure priorities; ensuring the south east is a learning region; and tourism growth. Actions in the plan that are of significance to Carlow in particular include industry led enterprise clustering; building on collaboration between industry, higher education institutes, including IT Carlow, and others to solve enterprise challenges; and supporting skills development and greater adoption of science, technology, engineering, arts and maths, STEAM, subjects, through making the south east a learning region.

The unemployment rate in the south-east region has decreased from 11.7% in quarter 1 of 2015 to 7.7% in quarter 4 of 2018. Despite this very significant progress, more needs to be done through the regional enterprise plan to reduce the unemployment rate to within 1% of the national average. The collaborative actions in this plan, along with the ongoing core activities of the enterprise agencies and local enterprise offices, LEOs, and the new initiatives in Future Jobs Ireland, will support this.

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