Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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The Action Plan for Jobs, which was introduced in early 2012, is one of the Government's key instruments to support job creation. It is a whole–of-Government, multi-annual initiative which mobilises all Departments to support job creation. The Action Plan for Jobs is working.

Since the first Action Plan for Jobs was launched in early 2012, almost 206,000 more people are at work. Over 66,000 jobs were created during 2016, well in excess of the APJ 2016 target of 50,000 new jobs. Employment growth is spread across all regions and all sectors of the economy and society. The annual increase in employment was 3.3%. Full-time employment increased by 4.7% while the number of part time workers declined by 1.4%, based on seasonally adjusted data. Almost four out of every five part-time workers are working part-time by choice.  The number of under-employed part-time workers declined by 11.5% during 2016. Under-employed refers to those who would work longer hours if available.

On the 1st February, we published the Action Plan for Jobs 2017. This Government's goal is to achieve sustainable full employment so that all of our people have the opportunity to enjoy rewarding work and to participate and contribute to their full potential to our economy and society.

The 2017 Plan sets out a range of measures to address the immediate challenges of the UK’s decision to leave the EU and also in response to a more volatile and changing external environment by strengthening the resilience and agility of our enterprise base. This includes actions to drive innovation, grow and scale Irish businesses, diversify our exports, promote entrepreneurship, improve our competitiveness performance, deliver the skills needs of our growing economy and ensure finance is available at competitive cost to support and underpin growth.

Securing full, sustainable employment in the face of global uncertainty will be challenging. I will work closely with colleagues across Government to ensure the effective delivery of the 2017 Plan to keep us on track to deliver on our 2020 target to have an additional 200,000 people at work, including 135,000 people outside of Dublin.