Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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256. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation her views on the warnings made in the National Competitiveness Council's latest report, Benchmarking Competitiveness: Ireland and the UK, 2017, with respect to Brexit posing a serious and imminent threat to the State's economic prosperity (details supplied). [22638/17]

Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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The latest report by the National Competitiveness Council highlights how the challenges posed by Brexit provide urgent impetus to pursue policies that enhance our competitiveness performance. The Council's report provides a timely reminder of Ireland's strengths, which need to be protected and enhanced, and also of areas where we need to remain vigilant and accelerate progress on addressing competitiveness gaps with the UK so as to ensure job creation across all regions.

My Department and the Government are very conscious of the need for a sustained focus on competitiveness. The 2017 Action Plan for Job sets out an ambitious target for Ireland to achieve a top 5 global competitiveness ranking based on the IMD Competitiveness Scorecard by 2020. Through the reforms set out in the 2017 Action Plan for Jobs, my Department and others are working to improve the ease of doing business, reduce the administrative burden by putting transactions on-line, enhance our cost competitiveness such as addressing insurance costs, increase innovation capacity and productivity and drive greater efficiencies across the enterprise base.

My Department is also increasing resources for Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland to increase the competitiveness of our indigenous enterprise base and enhance our attractiveness as a location for FDI relative to the UK. We have increased resources for the enterprise development agencies. Enterprise Ireland has published its new strategy for the period to 2020 while IDA Ireland is undertaking a progress review of its five year strategy. We are undertaking a review of our own Government enterprise policy Enterprise 2025. We are examining the sector-by-sector implications of the UK leaving the Single Market. Work is underway on possible future supports for SMEs that could be impacted by Brexit.  As a follow-on to the Government’s new Trade and Investment Strategy, Ireland Connected, launched in March, Enterprise Ireland will shortly publish its Eurozone Strategy.

The challenges posed by Brexit provide urgent impetus to pursue policies that enhance our competitiveness performance. We have already begun steps to address this, prioritising investment to improve the availability and quality of infrastructure as part of the Review of the Capital Plan and the forthcoming National Planning Framework, within the context of ensuring the sustainability of our public finances.

We have placed a central focus on further developing our skilled labour force so as to retain and win mobile investment and support the growth of a cohort of internationally-trading indigenous companies. We are continuing to invest in skills development under the National Skills Strategy.

Through a range of measures, including MicroFinance Ireland and the Credit Guarantee Scheme developed by my Department, we are enhancing access to competitively priced sources of finance for growth to facilitate businesses to establish and grow. We are also increasing public investment in R&D to enhance Ireland’s innovation performance.

The Government will continue to implement improvements to policies that were identified as priority areas in the report. Competitiveness is key to success in international markets and helping businesses to improve their competitiveness will remain a key focus for my Department and Government.