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

Very good. I will just give a rough rundown on what the action plan is. There are core elements that will remain constant from year to year. These are built around issues like competitiveness, which includes skills, research and development, cost structures, red tape and those sorts of areas. There is also the issue of Pathways to Work, which has been developed by the Ministers, Deputy Joan Burton and Deputy Ruairí Quinn, but is still key to the Action Plan for Jobs. It concerns how we make sure there is a fair shareout of job opportunities among those who do not have work.

Another standard piece each year has been access to finance, which has been a recurring difficulty for enterprise in recent years. We then have dedicated sections on Irish-owned companies which are exporting and on our attraction of foreign direct investment into the country, and these are also standard pieces. We also look at areas like procurement, which is an opportunity that many people recognise as one that needs to be developed. We then have sectoral pieces, which have been a feature each year, in particular in the areas of tourism, food, retail, the green economy and ICT. These are areas where we clearly believe we have a competitive advantage and we can build sustainable sectors for the future.

Another feature that was introduced last year is what we would call disruptive reforms. These are, if one likes, areas where we can take initiatives that we believe will have an impact across a wide range of sectors and are not defined by particular sectors. One example is ICT skills. It is very clear that ICT skills are driving change, not just in the sector that is described as ICT but in virtually every sector of the economy, where using the power of information technology to gather and analyse information and applying that is redefining the sort of business models that succeed. Therefore, we have committed to become the best provider of skills in Europe by increasing the proportion of ICT skills that are delivered from the Irish education system. Two years ago, this was at just 45%, and we want to bring that to 75% by 2018, so there is very significant expansion in this area. We have identified similar key areas that apply across sectors, such as trading online, driving energy efficiency and the introduction of a health innovation hub. The idea is to involve not only our good industry and our good research centres but our health system, so it can become a test bed for technologies that are emerging and, from there, become opportunities for us to build an export market on the back of test-bedded experience in the Irish medical system.

The areas we have highlighted this year as areas where we are focusing particular initiatives are threefold. One is entrepreneurship, the second is what we call winning abroad and the third is manufacturing. In the case of entrepreneurship, as the House probably knows, Mr. Sean O'Sullivan conducted an entrepreneurship forum for us during the course of last year and his work was presented to me earlier this year. We are now going to develop our first policy statement. As part of that, this year we are going to roll out the 31 local enterprise offices, which are a new approach to supporting local enterprise. What is new is that we have a centre of excellence in Enterprise Ireland so its work will be co-ordinated across the 31 bodies involved.

Enterprise Ireland will be developing best practice in terms of mentoring standards and new initiatives that can drive entrepreneurship and bring new thinking into the system. The provision of micro-finance funding is an example of an initiative we have driven in this area.

The third new element is that we are consciously embracing local authorities as an agent for enterprise development within their own areas. The resources we had in the county enterprise boards and an additional 50 staff from the business service units of the local authorities will be merged into one entity. In addition, we are recruiting graduates to assist in enterprise promotion. This will be a first-stop shop for micro-business and entrepreneurship, with a seamless connection back into Enterprise Ireland. It is about bringing small business and entrepreneurship development into the centre of public policy making. We have great ambition for this initiative.

In addition, this year we will establish a youth entrepreneurship fund. This idea came from members across the committees, the view being that there is a number of under-represented cohorts in entrepreneurship, including women, young people and non-Irish people. We are confident we can do better in all three of these areas. The approach of using a competition is helpful in this regard. We have employed it very successfully in the past two years in respect of business start-ups by women. The scheme was multiple times oversubscribed, in response to which we trebled the allocation. This is an area where we can do a great deal of work and it will be a strong theme this year.

The second issue I wish to highlight is winning business abroad. We have put additional feet on the ground in key markets, including 20 additional people for Enterprise Ireland's overseas team and 35 new staff for IDA Ireland. The idea is to build in emerging and new markets where we see an opportunity for either inward investment or new sales. We have enjoyed considerable success in this regard, with both IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland having record years in the past 12 months and creating nearly 12,000 net additional jobs between them. This represented a very significant advance on previous years. It is an area that is working and it warrants additional resources and additional targets to bolster it.

The third area to single out is manufacturing. It is a sector that has been neglected, but the changes that are happening mean it presents an opportunity Ireland should seek to seize. We have become more competitive in this area and trends in manufacturing suggest that areas where we have a competitive advantage will play strongly. For example, the merging of traditional products with ICT - smart products, smart medical devices, connected health and so on - is an area where Ireland ought to be carving out a competitive edge. The past 12 months have been encouraging in respect of manufacturing and we need to build on that. This year, we will identify 200 businesses out of our existing base of manufacturing companies which we believe can sustain a step up. To support that, one of the initiatives we have taken is the launch, earlier this week, of a development capital fund. Enterprise Ireland has put up €25 million for that fund, which is leveraged up with private sector investment. For the first €50 million given, we have €225 million when it is leveraged up. This represents a very significant fund to back traditional businesses that have the capacity to go global. There is a real opportunity in manufacturing and we need to tap into it.

Another issue of interest is the question of how well the action plan is performing, which has been the focus of a great deal of comment. This Government set itself two targets in this area. One was to become the best small country in which to do business and the other was to create a net 100,000 jobs by 2016. In the past 12 months, as we know from the statistics published last week, net job creation was 61,000 and we had a fifth consecutive quarter of net job creation. If we take it since the turning point on employment - obviously, there was some decline before that - net employment has grown by 72,000. We are past the half-way mark in respect of our target and I am confident we will reach it. In terms of our efforts to support and facilitate entrepreneurship, Forbes has indicated its view that we are indeed the best place in the world to do business. In terms of the world competitiveness rankings, we have gone from 24th to 17th, while the rankings for the best place to start a business put us tenth or thereabouts. We are showing signs of improvement, in other words, but there is more to be done.

One of the initiatives we are introducing this year, which follows from our discussions with the OECD, is to look at additional impact indicators which could help to bring more focus into some of the areas in which we are working. We will, for example, look at whether we can develop a suite of impact indicators around entrepreneurship so that we can see not only whether we are rolling out programmes that are of interest and have a good take-up but also whether we are seeing their impact in key areas. We will be considering headline indicators that could improve the focus of our action plan and the feedback mechanisms we use.

Each year we seek to make the action plan a more forensic and effective document. This year we will see a very significant focus on skill as an area we need to develop. The Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, recently published the review of apprenticeship. Next month SOLAS will publish its strategy for the successor to FÁS. At a time when employment growth is starting to recover, we will be looking at existing training models to see whether they can contribute more. Many people in Europe are looking to Germany as a country which weathered the recession particularly well. Its apprenticeship and traineeship models are very much routed in its culture and have certainly helped to make the country competitive globally, particularly in terms of its mittelstandcompanies, which are family-owned, engineering-type businesses. There are lessons for Ireland in that. The review of apprenticeships and SOLAS's strategic plan will be watched with considerable interest because they will throw up opportunities for some of our sectors to strengthen their own training pipeline. We have seen that one of the consequences of the recession was a decline in the commitment to training in some sectors, which is something we need to rectify.

I hope I have given Members a flavour of what we are about and I now look forward to their contributions. I prefer to hear Members' views rather than repeating what they can read in the document.