Dara Calleary
Question:77. Deputy Dara Calleary asked the Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation the progress to date in the Action Plan for Rural Development to increase the spread of jobs in all regions. [15474/19]
View answerTuesday, 14 May 2019
Questions (77)
Written answers
The Action Plan for Rural Development comes under the remit of Minister Michael Ring and has the stated target to support the creation of 135,000 new jobs in rural Ireland by 2020.
During February and March this year, I launched nine new Regional Enterprise Plans to 2020, which build on the very strong progress made on employment creation under the Regional Action Plan for Jobs 2015-2017 and take into account today’s new and emerging opportunities and challenges, including Brexit. The new Plans are complementary to the Action Plan for Rural Development and I am pleased to say that implementation has commenced in all regions.
Shaped from the ‘bottom-up’ by regional stakeholders, and overseen by my Department, the new Regional Enterprise Plans to 2020 complement national level policies and programmes emanating from the ‘top-down’ and, there is strong alignment with Ireland’s national enterprise policy, Enterprise 2025 Renewed and the Future Jobs Ireland initiative.
The principle behind the Regional Enterprise Plans is collaboration between regional stakeholders on initiatives that can help to realise each region’s enterprise development potential. These stakeholders include: the Local Authorities, the LEOs, the enterprise agencies, the Regional Skills Forum, higher and further education institutes, tourism bodies, private sector ‘enterprise champions’, and others.
The Regional Enterprise Plans to 2020 and the Action Plan for Rural Development are central pillars of the Government’s ambition to create an additional 200,000 jobs, of which 135,000 are outside the Dublin region by 2020 and the Government's commitment to prioritise balanced regional development.
There has been strong progress to date in delivering to these targets. According to the most recent CSO quarterly Labour Force Survey (seasonally unadjusted at regional level), the national employment target for 2020 has already been exceeded, with 2,281,300 in employment as of Q4 2018, which is the highest number at work ever recorded. With nearly 133,000 jobs created outside of Co. Dublin since Q1 2016, the Government is well positioned to meet the regional employment growth target by the end of 2020.
Through the new Regional Enterprise Plans and the ongoing work of the enterprise agencies and the LEOs, the Government remains committed to achieving an overall jobs uplift of between 10 and 15 per cent in each region by 2020 and to bring and/or maintain unemployment levels in each region to within at least one percentage point of the State average.
Unemployment has fallen in every region since the launch of the Regional Action Plan for Jobs initiative in 2015. Only two regions, the Midlands and South-East, are currently outside the unemployment target set for 2020.
In February I announced very good results from the Local Enterprise Offices around the country. Overall, they supported the creation of 3,656 new jobs (net) in 2018.
All regions saw increases in IDA employment over 2018, with the Midlands region experiencing the highest growth at 14 percent.
Also, two-thirds (64 percent) of new Enterprise Ireland jobs created in 2018 were outside of Dublin. The North West saw the largest level of increases at 9 percent.
It is also important to note that as well as meeting the numerical targets, it is also about creating jobs that are of good quality and sustainable over the longer term. The Government is focused on this agenda at the national level through the Future Jobs Ireland initiative, and we are focused on this agenda through the Regional Enterprise Plans.
Finally, a number of funding streams have been made available to drive further progress on employment growth in regional and rural Ireland, such as my Department's Regional Enterprise Development Fund (REDF), and those under Project Ireland 2040 including the Urban and Rural Regeneration and Development Funds.