Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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314. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the national and regional job targets under the programme for Government and Enterprise 2025 in each of the years 2016 to 2020; the latest quarterly national household survey data; the most recent figures for these targets in each region; the job targets up to 2020 on an annual basis, by region, in tabular form; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [7495/18]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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The national jobs target in Enterprise 2025 was for 2.18 million people to be in employment by the end of 2020. This is aligned with the goal under the 2016 Programme for a Partnership Government to deliver an extra 200,000 jobs by 2020, of which 135,000 will be outside of Dublin. These targets are on course to be met and exceeded with employment in the State having increased by 91,000 since the end of Quarter 1 2016.

With a strong focus on job creation and retention, the annual Action Plan for Jobs provides a framework for collaboration between Government Departments and Agencies to achieve this objective.

Between June 2015 and January 2016, my Department published eight Regional Action Plans for Jobs, aimed at raising employment levels in the regions and facilitating them to achieve their economic potential. Each plan contains a series of actions with timelines for delivery between 2015-2017, through improved collaboration between enterprise agencies and other stakeholders supporting enterprise development in the regions. A key objective of each of the plans is to have a further 10 to 15 per cent at work in each region by 2020, with the unemployment rate of each region within one percentage point of the national average. The attached table shows our progress towards these employment targets up to Quarter 2 2017.

On 16 January 2018, the Central Statistics Office released the Labour Force Survey for Quarter 3 2018, which has replaced the Quarterly National Household Survey as the official source of data for employment and unemployment in Ireland. The data presented in the report incorporates adjustments to previous releases to take account of revisions to population estimates arising from the 2016 Census of Population. Due to the break in the time-series of regional employment data, comparisons that span Quarter 2 to Quarter 3 2017 cannot be reliably made. As a result, the data presented in the table attached spans Q1 2015 - Q2 2017.

Regional Employment Performance Q1 2015 – Q2 2017 (thousand):

Source: Labour Force Survey Quarter 3 2017, CSO