Brendan Smith urges regional investment, cross-border skills push

Thank you very much. Apologies, I missed the earlier presentations because I was at another meeting as well as other colleagues. Could I just welcome your presentations and I suppose it's a good thing that we have to address skills, needs, it shows there are employment opportunities in our country which wasn't the way two decades ago or even less in a shorter time frame than that. Could I just say, again I would echo what Senator Kennelly said in regard to regional provision, I represent Cavanagh Monaghan, oftentimes we can fall between the northeast and the northwest of the country, so I would again emphasise as Senator Kennelly and other colleagues mentioned, the need to ensure that there's good provision for people in the regions. Could I just say it's welcome that 55% of the investments for this year, IDA projected investments, will be targeted for the regions and that's absolutely essential. And I hope that the south of Ulster, including Cavanagh Monaghan, are targeted in a vigorous way as well. We need that investment because, as all of you know, we suffered so much over the years due to the political trouble along our border and in our counties that resulted from the trouble in Northern Ireland as well. And that was, that ensured that it was very, very difficult to attract investment. And again, I put on the record here the huge effort and success of local businesses in establishing, setting up and many of them becoming international corporations as you know yourselves. And they deserve great credit for their success despite the immediate challenges they had due to the location that they had established their businesses. Could I just say, it's obviously important that academia and our colleges with second level further education and higher level, that they are very attuned to the policies that you see that need to be implemented. Does the IDA, Skillnet, Enterprise Ireland, are you represented on the boards of management or the governing bodies of any of the higher institutes or on their academic councils or whatever governance structures the higher education colleges and the further education colleges have? I think it's very important that you will be there where decisions are made as well to be able to contribute to the process of the colleges in their planning their courses. I also mention the need to address skills. I believe in an all-Ireland context. You know, years ago I advocated as a member of government that Invest Ireland should be merged with IDA, Enterprise Ireland or whatever. I got a fairly strong slap down from political people in Northern Ireland in regard to that particular proposal because we have all seen at first-hand the good collaboration working together on trade promotion visits and all of that. So there is obviously great potential there to have deep cooperation with your sister, with your counterparts in Northern Ireland. Maybe that exists but I'm sure there's opportunities to develop and build on that and I hope that that is true. So with regard to the area the area of skills is the collaboration between yourselves and your counterparts in Northern Ireland and the educational authorities in Northern Ireland as well. Because I think it's absolutely important in that respect. Our island is very small. Thankfully we have seen the growth of the all-Ireland economy since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. And as a person who lives along the border, I have seen the seamless transition to the all-Ireland economy where so many of my constituents work in Ferman or Toronto or Armagh and so many of my neighbours from Fermanagh and in the other neighbouring counties in Armagh and Toronto come to Cavanagh for employment as well. So that border in inverted commas doesn't exist in regard to employment and business. But I think we need to reinforce that as well in our whole enterprise strategy and in our whole area of business development. Cyber security. And I just glanced through your presentations because I honestly didn't get a chance to read them in detail. I don't think I saw reference to cyber security. Maybe it comes under digital skills. But I read a statistic some time ago that the most attacks on enterprises, most cyber attacks on enterprises was on small and medium enterprises, which is obviously a huge cost and difficulty for those smaller and medium enterprises. I know Minister Lawless has assured us in response to parliamentary questions, the Minister for Father and Higher Education, that there would be an emphasis on developing more skills in the cyber security area. Are your organisations, are you seeing at first hand and listening to the companies who are suffering through these cyber security attacks? We know of the geopolitical situation today throughout the world, unfortunately. We listen to people in the eastern part of Europe, particularly in the eastern part of the European Union, that they are subject to constant cyber attacks, drone attacks, whatever. Are we preparing enough for that ever-present danger that's facing us, not just in the future, but today as well? Thank you, Aghaeirig. Aghaeirig. Thanks, Deputy. Just to pick up on some of the points that you raised. In terms of, I mentioned it earlier on to the committee, our end of year results last year, we were delighted to announce 69% of the jobs of Enterprise Ireland companies in 2025 were outside of Dublin, so that focus on regional development is really, really significant and a really key focus for us. We have companies to ourselves and indeed to local enterprise office in every county in Ireland, in every town and village and that's a hugely important part of our focus. In terms of Cavan and Monaghan, I'm very aware of work with a lot of the excellent companies up there and very aware of how innovative they are and how global some of those companies are and the need for skills and talent and what they're doing to support apprenticeships and the development of skills to meet the future of their business needs. So I think it's something we're very focused on and will continue to be. In terms of the board participation question you mentioned, we don't actively sit on the boards but work very closely with the universities in the third level in a range of fora and initiatives and on particular programmes that Helen can mention in a bit more detail in a minute. Invest NI and our counterpart agencies in the north, again, we work very closely with them. I think a really good example is one of our flagship programmes that we run for our companies called Leadership for Growth, which is supporting CEOs of companies to immerse themselves in a strategic plan for their business to really drive that growth and to initiate scale, allow those companies to grow and to scale. We work very closely with Invest NI and indeed have companies from Invest NI, their portfolio participate on the programme. So you're not only are you getting the supporting companies in terms of the capability that the programme provides, but also those connections between companies, both those in the north and those in the Republic. And finally, in terms of cyber security, I think you're absolutely right. It's an area of increasing focus for us. I would think, call out two things in particular we've been doing, is working with the likes of the Eddies to ensure and support the programmes they're running, which is focused on developing that cyber security capability within our SME base. And indeed, we have a cyber security grant as well, which we've made available to companies, which is to enable them to get consultancy support, to put the necessary steps in place that they can be as cyber secure as possible in terms of the needs of their business. So it's something, again, we're very focused on in terms of working collaboratively with others to deliver programmes and training, but also directly in terms of grant support. Thank you. Just to add to that, we are in a number of enterprise engagement groups with universities and also with further education in terms of highlighting the skills needs. And also Enterprise Ireland is represented in all the Regional Skills 4 groups, including the IDEA and Skillnet in terms of feeding into the education and training providers in the regions. And we are actively involved in the North East and in the North West and with the Regional Skills 4 managers up there as well. And we also run the Spotlight on Skills programme in those regions to ensure that we're supporting companies in terms of identification of skills needs. We also have a partnership with Solace on rolling out leadership and management development supports to smaller companies all over Ireland through all the ETBs, including Cavan Monaghan. And the certification of that is actually through Northern Ireland with the ILM certification process. So there is a partnership there in terms of certification, just to be aware of. And we were very happy with the joint announcement of the new joint apprenticeship that was announced between Ireland and Northern Ireland as well. So there's a number of partnerships happening in the skills capacity space. Thank you.