Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent)
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208. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation if the €250 million fund for the Action Plan for Jobs will fund all the regional action plans, or if each regional action plan will be granted €250 million separately; if a specific amount of funding will be ring-fenced for each county, or if funding will be distributed on the basis of job creation proposals, essentially through a tendering process; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [43953/15]

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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In launching the Action Plan for Jobs Regional initiative earlier this year, the Government announced that funding of up to €250 million will be made available over the next five years to support the Regional Action Plan process across all 8 regions. IDA Ireland is investing in a €150m Regional Property Programme over the five year period to ensure that there is sufficient availability of utility intensive Strategic Sites, quality Business Parks and Advance Building Solutions to attract investment to the Regions. So far this year, Advance Technology Buildings have been completed in both Waterford and Athlone and the construction of buildings in Sligo, Castlebar and Tralee is at an advanced stage of procurement. Next year, IDA Ireland will continue this programme of advance builds with projects in Galway, Dundalk and Limerick. Investment in IDA Ireland’s portfolio of Business and Technology Parks around the country is also underway.

A further sum of up to €100 million will be made available through Enterprise Ireland over the next five years to support innovative and collaborative approaches to support job creation across the regions.

The Enterprise Ireland funds will be distributed through three new competitive calls:

- A €5m Community Enterprise Initiative, to stimulate and support enterprise and job creation throughout the country at local, community and regional level. This competitive call has closed and applications are currently being assessed.

- A €5m fund open to groups of Local Enterprise Offices who come together to bid for funding for projects to support job-creation initiatives in their areas. This competitive call has closed and applications are currently being assessed.

- A third, broader, competitive regional call, will support significant projects or initiatives to improve or leverage identified enterprise capability in the regions. An expression of interest phase for this call has concluded and is informing the development of the competitive call, to be launched shortly.

In the case of all three funding calls, a collaborative approach, tangible jobs impact, enterprise start-up and scaling are amongst the criteria against which applications will be measured. It is not intended to ring-fence funding at county level.

The Regional Action Plans will cover the three-year period 2015-2017 to allow for the process to take hold and develop, and to capture a more medium-term ambition for the regions. However, the Regional Action Plans will also be flexible and dynamic to allow additional actions and ideas to be added as they emerge over the period of the Plan.

The success of the regional Action Plans will lie in the delivery of the actions on schedule. The process will be underpinned by robust reporting arrangements, with twice yearly updates to be published in each region setting out the progress on each of the actions due for delivery. Implementation of each Plan will be overseen by a Regional Implementation Committee, established within each region, which will involve the key stakeholders in the region. Given that strong business representation is also required to drive the enterprise and jobs focus of the Plan, I am appointing locally-based Enterprise Champions in each region to participate on the Implementation Committee.