I thank Deputy Cooney for raising this very important Topical Issue on the mid-west region, Shannon Airport and County Clare. The mid-west region is uniquely positioned to drive balanced regional development, with assets including Shannon Airport, Foynes Port, excellent road and rail connectivity and a highly skilled workforce. There are strong links to leading education institutions. The region has all the fundamentals required to support sustained industrial growth and job creation. Government policy is fully aligned with unlocking this potential. Through the White Paper on Enterprise 2022-2030 and our regional development agenda, we are focused on ensuring every region, including the mid-west region, can realise its full economic and employment potential. My Department contributes to this agenda through the work of IDA lreland, Enterprise Ireland, the local enterprise offices, LEOs, and nine regional enterprise plans, REPs. The regional enterprise plans have proven effective in fostering regional collaboration, bringing together key stakeholders to identify challenges and opportunities and to take action in areas such as cluster development, manufacturing and knowledge economy. Since 2017 my Department, through Enterprise Ireland, has made available over €150 million in regional enterprise development funding. Looking ahead, Enterprise 2035, as set out in the programme for Government, will build on this progress. It will support long-term enterprise growth and job creation, focusing on key enablers such as skills, infrastructure, digital connectivity, access to finance and sustainability. The LEOs play a vital role at grassroots level, supporting job creation in small businesses across the region, providing targeted grants for scaling and exporting firms, including support for specialist hires, and driving digital, green and lean transformation across sectors. Enterprise Ireland also supports over 700 client companies across the mid-west region, with employment growing in 2025 to almost 27,000. This growth is driven by strong performance in key sectors like medtech and healthcare, as referenced by Deputy Cooney. We are seeing this in major announcements, including Aerogen, lreland's largest indigenous medtech company, announcing this year the creation of 725 jobs between its two manufacturing sites in Shannon and Galway and Vitalograph's expansion in Clare and Limerick which will see it take on an extra 200 employees. In May 2025, Enterprise Ireland announced the high potential start-up, HPSU, class of 2024 in which €27.6 million was invested in Irish start-ups, supporting over 157 start-ups in 2024 through HPSU or pre-seed funding, of which six were in the mid-west. The region is already delivering strong results. There are 158 IDA client companies in the mid-west region employing 28,125 people, with employment among IDA clients increasing by 18% in recent years. Key sectors include technology, life sciences, international financial services and engineering. The strategic location, excellent connectivity through Shannon Airport, and a skilled workforce supported by the UL and TUS make the mid-west region an attractive environment for multinational corporations. Some of the major FDI companies have expanded their operations here, citing access to talent, quality infrastructure, and Government support through IDA Ireland as key factors. Adjoining Shannon International Airport, Shannon Free Zone remains a cornerstone of international investment, hosting one of the largest clusters of North American investment in the State, with continued growth in traded services and technology investment also accelerating. Looking ahead, continued investment, infrastructure and collaboration will ensure the Shannon region can fully capitalise on its key advantages.

Sentiment score: 0.49

I again thank Deputy Cooney. I had a great visit with him to County Clare and Shannon focusing on some of the key businesses that are there. We visited the Roche site, where there is huge potential, and we saw the works that are being carried out to remediate that site. We also visited Beckman Coulter, another exciting life sciences company, and we will see significant investment from other companies in the region, like Jaguar Land Rover, which is really working to invest significantly, and also PPG and Zimmer Biomet. There is huge opportunity. Working with Deputy Cooney and the key support he has provided to me and the Government, we hope we will have a very significant announcement during the summer by a leading Irish-born company in relation to Shannon. This will be a strong testament to the work of the Government in providing the key infrastructure but also in ensuring that we have a highly skilled workforce, and that we are getting key training opportunities into our workforce to meet the challenges of artificial intelligence, getting our skills observatory up and running, and ensuring that the high-performance in Enterprise Ireland that looks after our homegrown entities is excelling. We see right now that of the 196 high-performance graduates, half of them are grounded in AI. That is where we need to be as a country to take those key opportunities. I assure Deputy Cooney of my purpose and delivery and we will work very hard together to ensure we are delivering for the west and Shannon as a key economic hub and a driver for the mid-west and our country, as the Deputy has pointed out. I know it has been very successful at getting additional funding under the regional airports fund and it will be important to keep up that commitment from Government. I assure the Deputy of my support and I look forward to the announcement later in the summer. Last year, on a trade mission, as the first time ever for an Irish Minister, I visited the top Irish-born companies in Ireland over two days and sought what their issues and challenges were. Right now in this country, the top ten Irish-born companies employ 450,000 people globally, which is a very strong testament to Irish-born companies and the indigenous economy.

Sentiment score: 0.55