David Cullinane (Sinn Fein)

I welcome the Minister of State back to the House again. I have raised on a number of occasions the issue of job creation, job losses and the responsibility of the Government and State agencies in the south east and in Waterford. I raise this Adjournment motion on foot of a response that my party colleague, Deputy Tóibín, received from a number of State enterprise agencies about a county by county breakdown of IDA grants, the number of IDA supported companies in each county, the number of jobs that have been created and lost in each county by the IDA, Enterprise Ireland and enterprise boards.

The last time the Minister of State was in the House, we spoke about the Forfás plan. The plan refers to the south east playing to its strengths. It mentions life sciences, clean technology, internationally trading services, agrifood and so on. I fully support that. However, I had two problems with the plan. First, it failed to address the core problem that the south east has the highest unemployment level in the country, 4% above the national average. Second, it did not set any clear, realistic, deliverable targets that would reduce that figure. Every region wants to see unemployment reduced and we want to see reductions across the board. I know the Government is working on this area, perhaps not to my satisfaction, but it has its own plans.

We are hearing from reports like this that the enterprise agencies will do all of these wonderful things for Waterford and the south east, but when we look at the hard facts and figures, that is not the case. Let us look at the grant aid that has been made available to IDA sponsored companies in Waterford over the last number of years. In 2006, it was €4.6 million. In 2007, it was €7.2 million. In 2008, it was €4.7 million. What did Waterford get when the downturn came? It got €854,000 in 2009 and €1.4 million in 2010. This happened despite the fact that the average investment by the IDA from 2006 to 2008 was about €85 million. In 2010 it was €120 million. The amount of grant aid being made available and spent by the IDA was going up, but the amount that Waterford is getting is going down.

That has a knock-on effect across the region. Kilkenny received nothing in 2006, €635,000 in 2007, nothing in 2008, nothing in 2009 and nothing in 2010. Wexford received nothing in 2008, €190,000 in 2009 and €569,000 in 2010. This has happened in spite of the fact that we have high concentrations of investment going into Cork and Dublin. I do not wish to pitch this as a competition between any area, but I must make the point that the south east is lagging behind. It has the highest level of unemployment.

In two of the last three years, there was not a single visit by an IDA client company into Kilkenny. In two of the last three years, we have seen very few such visits to Wexford. Waterford has received a fair amount of visits, but the companies have not set up. However, the crunch is in the job losses because all of this is about whether the plans are working and whether we are creating jobs. In 2007, there were 6,300 sponsored jobs in Waterford. That dropped to 6,000 in 2008, to 5,600 in 2009, 5,300 in 2010 and 4,600 in 2011. We see the pattern of jobs being lost every year and not being replaced. It is great to have a report and say all of this stuff is happening, but the Forfás report does not put in place any realistic, deliverable, credible proposals that will deal with the facts that I have presented here today, which show that Waterford and the south-east region are lagging behind in job creation. The enterprise agencies are frankly not doing enough.