Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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280. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the funding she has allocated, by regional jobs action plan, in each of the years 2016 to 2020, in tabular form; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [16541/16]

Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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In launching the Action Plan for Jobs Regional initiative in 2015, the Government announced that all eight regional Action Plans will be supported by investment of up to €250 million over the period to 2020, including €150 million for a property investment programme by IDA Ireland.

A further sum of up to €100 million will be made available over the period through three competitive calls to be administered by Enterprise Ireland.

In this context, on 22 January last, a €3m Regional Accelerator Scheme was launched, which aims ultimately to create more accelerator spaces in the regions where start-ups can locate their businesses and access supports. It is targeted that a further €3m will be leveraged with additional private sector investment to support this entrepreneurship initiative. This Regional Accelerator Scheme was the first competitive initiative to be launched under the €40m competitive regional jobs fund announced by the Government on 15 January.

More recently, on June 1st last, I announced an initial allocation of €5m in competitive funding for 48 local and regional initiatives under two of these calls: the LEO Competitive Fund and the Community Enterprise Initiative. This €5m allocation will support ‘bottom up’ projects where:

- The Local Enterprise Offices will group together to create collaborative projects in their region (€2m) and

- Community organisations will partner with other regional organisations to deliver new job creation projects (€3m).

Further competitive regional funding calls will be rolled out on a phased basis.

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