Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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65. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the potential number of projected jobs that will be created under Enterprise 2025, by sector, by year, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [43181/15]

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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Enterprise 2025 sets out the potential to reach 2.180 million in employment and an overall unemployment rate of 6 percent by 2020. This is based on the premise of export led growth and the additional indirect jobs stimulated by the activities of exporting enterprises in the wider economy.

The ambition is predicated on taking the actions set out in Enterprise 2025 which are focused on supporting the productive sector, enhancing our relative competitiveness, leveraging existing comparative advantage in key sectors, addressing structural issues in the economy, improving productivity and the capacity of enterprises to innovate. Enterprise 2025 is a whole of enterprise strategy that leverages the potential across all sectors of the economy in manufacturing and services activities, both exporting and domestically oriented. The Government’s efforts will be on achieving a step change in enterprise performance across the whole enterprise base.

Our enterprise development agencies provide financial and advisory supports to enterprises that export from Ireland, and/or have the potential to do so including foreign and Irish owned entities - supporting direct job creation and stimulating indirect job creation across the wider economy.

Enterprise 2025 sets out the sectors in which Ireland has comparative advantage and that contribute the greater proportion toward exports. These sectors account for a significant proportion of the enterprise agency client portfolio and include ICT (hardware and software), Health Lifesciences (that includes pharma, biopharma and medical technologies), International Financial Services, Internationally Traded Services, Engineering/Industrial Products and Agri-Food. New areas of opportunity and untapped potential are highlighted in Enterprise 2025. The reality is that all sectors are evolving in response to market demands and enabled by technology developments – presenting considerable opportunities arising from convergence, new business models and new end market segments (such as smart ageing).

The agencies will contribute significantly to achieving the ambition for employment creation set out in Enterprise 2025. The enterprise agencies will each set annual targets in the context of the overall ambition. Annualised targets have not been set out in the Strategy, rather we have assessed where there is potential for employment growth across four broad sectoral cohorts that span the whole of the private sector economy as set out in Table 1 (and extends beyond the client cohort of the enterprise development agencies).

Table 1 - Enterprise 2025 Sectoral Ambition