The Action plan for jobs came out yesterday with 270 action points for jobs. It was criticised by many as more rhetoric but here are some points that I believe are worthwhile:
It is great to have a vision and Enda Kenny’s vision of being the best small country in the world to do business and this echoes Bill Clinton’s view that Ireland could be the gateway to the world not just Europe.
Some of the good points:
- Focus on being a specialist in areas such as cloud, gaming, agri-business as well as focus on areas in manufacturing and healthcare for job creation. It is important to highlight that jobs in these areas produce downstream jobs in other areas
- While the diaspora finders fee itself may not raise much in terms of jobs the link with the diaspora is crucial. MBNA hired at his peak over 1000 staff for Carrick on Shannon but only based themselves their as their was an Irish connection with Carrick on Shannon – so we cannot underestimate the power of the Irish brand
- The funding released for small businesses to help them gain quick financing is also a very positive step.
- While they are pulling a lot of former initiatives together they have at least packaged this and promised regular updates on it
- There are lots of smaller initiatives around
To create 100,000 jobs in 4 years is very challenging given that:
- There will be no increase in public sector employment therefore everything will be based on private enterprise
- It is very export focused and as a result, we are somewhat reliant on the pick-up in Europe
- While we have great plans to target the BRIC countries, currently it is only accounting for 2.3% of our exports so a long way to go there
- The Government speaks about quarterly reports on progress and that really is the nub of this as we need to be able to have a transparent view on what has happened and what level of growth in jobs we are seeing.
For those currently unemployed there is no short term solution but Minister Quinn and Burton will be providing a plan around training and upskilling which we will hopefully see in the next month.
Here is a link to Peter Cosgrove discussing the plan on the RTE business show:
