Speech by Taoiseach, Enda Kenny T.D., at the Launch of the 2015 Action Plan for Jobs

As you know we first launched the Action Plan for Jobs process in ICON in 2012. Since then ICON has continued to be a fantastic Irish success story.

It is an Irish company with a global reach. It represents the best of Irish enterprise: Innovative & exporting with a focus on a high quality service.

Today they build on their contribution to Ireland with the fantastic announcement of 200 new jobs, roughly split between Leopardstown and Limerick.

These 200 jobs will be part of the 40,000 new jobs the Government is targeting this year.

This is where the Action Plan for Jobs comes into play.
Through it, we have been able to drive reform to create the best possible business environment in Ireland for all enterprise.

All of our plans that help support enterprise to create jobs are coordinated through the Action Plan for Jobs.  

It is about making sure Government delivers on action to create jobs. Policy and strategies are useless unless every part of the State is committed to delivering and held accountable for failing.

We have advanced over 1,000 actions since 2012.  In 2015, we have 400 more to deliver.  And you’ll know well from our quarterly updates – the latest of which we are publishing today – that we are serious about reporting on our progress and follow up.  

Every action has to be reported on and each year, we get more than 90 per cent of them delivered within the year.  If we miss a target, we will outline a plan to achieve it.

The Action Plan for Jobs process has been a fantastic success. At the outset we set ourselves a target of 100,000 new jobs by 2016 and we have delivered on 80,000 of these since we launched the Action Plan for Jobs in 2012.
Our overall goal is to return the country to full employment by 2018. That means that there will be a job for every working age man and woman who wants one.

This will effectively reverse all the job losses of the economic crisis two years ahead of schedule.

With indigenous exports and foreign direct investment at all time record levels it is clear that the plan is working.

By keeping jobs as the number one priority for Government, I expect that next year we will see more Irish people returning home to take up jobs than those leaving.

This will be an important turning point in our economic recovery.

We will continue to reform our tax system to continue to make Ireland more attractive for returning workers. This month, people will be opening their paycheques to discover that they will have a little more in their pocket. The Government has committed to repeating these tax reductions in the next Budget to continue to make work pay.

In the end, it is really all about jobs and the impact they have in raising living standards for families.

The creation of a job is a life-changer – for the person and for their family.  It is the most tangible sign of economic recovery that anyone can feel.

With this in mind the 2015 Action Plan for Jobs sets out the agenda for the year ahead.  

We have a number of significant new initiatives in 2015, which Minister Bruton will outline. And we have many actions that build on what has gone before… in access to finance, in support for entrepreneurs, in areas such as construction and retail, in attracting FDI… across the entire economy.

The actions we are setting out here are complemented by our Pathways to Work strategy – driven by the Tánaiste – which is seeking to make work pay.

Minister Nash will be focusing on delivering the Low Pay Commission this year while Minister English will be prioritising new apprenticeships and publishing a new skills strategy to help jobseekers back into work.

There is also a special focus in this year’s Action Plan for Jobs on regional economic development.  

All regions have increased employment since 2012 but some have grown more than others.  And every region has its own particular unemployment black-spots.

In the coming weeks a series of national and local job and economic agencies will be outlining their regional enterprise plans to map out what they will do to help create new jobs across Ireland.

This is an essential part of our plan to ensure the recovery is felt nationwide and leads to balanced economic development.

The success of the Action Plan for Jobs in rebuilding an enterprise economy is unquestionable. It will continue to map out the path to full employment to 2018. In the longer term we need to set out how we want to develop Ireland’s enterprise economy. How we will secure recovery and avoid the catastrophic unemployment shocks that devastated our country.

In 2015 we will bring forward a new enterprise policy and strategy statement for the period up to 2025, setting out the vision for enterprise development to ensure that Irish based enterprises are among the most innovative, productive, competitive and entrepreneurial in the world.

Before I finish I would like to take a moment to pay special tribute to our Industry Partners, who are supporting us with the Action Plan for Jobs. They help us by bringing direct private sector enterprise perspectives to the content of each year’s Plan. This is important work and we’re going to do more of it in 2015.

Many thanks again to ICON for hosting us this morning and I wish them every success as they add to their workforce here in Dublin and Limerick.