Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)
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18. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the number of small scale sector appropriate foreign direct investment enterprises that have been brought to small rural towns by the IDA over each of the past five years. [42965/17]

Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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The IDA is focused on attracting job-rich foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinationals to Ireland. One of the Agency's key priorities is ensuring that such investment is spread as evenly as possible around the country and that every region of Ireland benefits from overseas FDI.

While the general global trend is for FDI to be located in or around major urban areas, the IDA has placed a special emphasis on attracting overseas companies to regional Ireland. This is evidenced by the Agency's current five-year strategy, which sets ambitious targets of increasing investment by between 30-40% in every region of the country by 2019.

Progress continues to be made towards reaching that goal. For example, the Agency's mid-year results for 2017 show that 54% of all job approvals so far this year are for investments located outside of Dublin. This is up from 37% at the same time last year. Moreover, over half of all IDA Ireland supported jobs created last year were based outside of Dublin.

The investments that have been secured for rural and regional areas span many different sectors and industries. They also differ significantly in their individual size and scale. Their key unifying feature is that the companies behind the investments have all decided to locate or expand outside of Ireland's main urban centres. I am confident that the confidence that these businesses have rightfully placed in the regions will help lead in turn to further FDI across the country.