Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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224. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the regional job targets projected in the programme for Government for 2020 and in Enterprise 2025, by year, in tabular form; how she will achieve these and the monitoring and reporting mechanisms in place; her job targets up to 2020, by region; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [13979/16]

Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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Ireland’s return to economic growth has demonstrated our ability, through concerted efforts across Government to focus actions on those areas that help to create jobs. We have made substantial progress since the Action Plan for Jobs process was first introduced in 2012. We can point to the considerable strides made in reducing the unemployment rate from 15.1% at the start of the Action Plan for Jobs process to 7.8 percent in May 2016, with 155,000 extra at work since early 2012.

The Programme for Government sets out a target to create an additional 200,000 jobs from over the period 2016 to 2020, informed by our statement on enterprise policy, Enterprise 2025, which set out Ireland’s potential across a number of key metrics. I am convinced that achieving our ambition for sustainable job growth will require a continued cross government focus on addressing the challenges and realising the ambition set out in Enterprise 2025.

To deliver on this ambitious target, in the Programme for Government we commit to maintaining the OECD endorsed Action Plan for Jobs (APJ) Process that will set out, on an annual basis, the best ideas for job creation within available resources. Building on this process, we are focused on ensuring that we can support new job creation in every region in the country over the next five years, through the implementation of the Regional Action Plans for Jobs. A key objective of the plans is to have a further 10 to 15 per cent at work in each region by 2020, with the aim, as set out in Enterprise 2025, of having the unemployment rate of each region within one per cent of the national average. Good progress is being made on the targets in the regional Action Plans with 44,500 extra at work in 2015.

The Regional Action Plan initiative brings the different stakeholders in each of the regions together to identify a range of innovative and practical actions, to be taken across a range of Departments and agencies, with clear timelines for delivery over the period 2015 – 2017.

Each Plan is being monitored and driven in each region by a Regional Implementation Committee, with membership drawn from industry, local authorities, Enterprise Agencies, education sector and other key stakeholders and agencies. Collaboration between the private and the public sector has been a core element in each plan’s development, and will be central to each plan’s delivery. The first Progress Reports on the implementation of the Plans, covering the period to end-June 2016, will be completed and published in Q3 2016.

The focus on job creation is a government wide agenda, and it involves:

- achieving a leap forward in the capacity and the performance of enterprises based here and in attracting further investment. We will put in place an extra €500 million in capital funding to accelerate export led jobs growth across Ireland’s regions;

- focusing investments in areas where Ireland can differentiate itself internationally – specifically education & Skills, creating attractive places to live and work and supporting enterprise innovation;

- improving the environment for business in terms of access to finance, cost competitiveness, tax environment and economic infrastructures. The Programme for Government commits to introducing tax incentives to support our entrepreneurs and job creators, including further reducing Capital Gains Tax for new start-ups, and increasing the earned income tax credit for the self-employed; and,

- maintaining a focus on protecting our national competitiveness from unsustainable cost growth.