Ministers announce initiative to attract more jobs to Border area

A major effort to draw jobs into the Border counties has been announced by Minister for Employment Micheál Martin, Minister for Education Mary Hanafin, and Northern Ireland Minister for Employment and Learning Sir Reg Empey.

Speaking following an informal meeting in Dublin yesterday, Mr Martin said they had agreed to organise a skills conference sometime after Easter next year. The jointly hosted conference, said Mr Martin, would "focus on the Border areas to get a more localised intelligence on skills around the Border counties so as to be in a position to offer employers better information and also to the colleges so they might be in a position to fill in any gaps in terms of skills provision".

Other items discussed were forecasting skills needs, business innovation and the level of inward migration.

"The three major areas we covered were the whole area of skills - development, forecasting, developing a strong database between North and South as to a skill profile of workers and how we can improve that," said Mr Martin. "We discussed the whole area of business innovation and agreed to work together to see whether we can jointly develop some projects around innovation.

"Thirdly, we discussed the inward migration issue, the impact on the economy, employment and skills and basically sharing experience to see if we can learn from each other's experience of inward migration . . . and the pros and cons of that," he added.

Between 10 and 11 per cent of the workforce was now non-Irish, and the Government was keeping a "watching brief" on this and its impact on employment.

Migration "follows where there are opportunities". Mr Martin continued. "If opportunities dry up, you will see the pattern and rate of inward migration slowing down as well. The key is to continue to upskill, to continue to give people the opportunities to gain skills in Ireland so they are in a position to avail of the opportunities that emerge."

Mr Empey said the North's economy needed to "grow the private sector very substantially".

He said he hoped co-operation between both governments could draw more employment into rural areas, in particular in the Border areas.

He said inward migration was a "new phenomenon for us", with about 40,000 migrants in the North. He said the North's government was "anxious" to learn from the South's experiences.