Ceisteanna ó na Comhaltaí Eile - Other Members’ Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-10
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Sean Fleming (FF), Laois

What the Taoiseach said is interesting. Based on what he said, I can confirm the unusual situation that there are more people who leave County Laois every day to go to work outside the county than there are people with jobs in the county. More Laois people have to commute to work, maybe using the motorway. However, there is also good news. The IDA bought a 45 acre site a few years ago adjacent to a site it already had and it has planning permission to develop it. Let us hope that will bring jobs. The first critical step is for the IDA to arrange a few site visits, not a miserable two visits which it arranged two years ago. The figure has to be up at ten or 12. I understand the issue of clustering and I believe that can have an impact. We need a good kickstart in Laois to get up there in that regard.
Enterprise Ireland is not much better. We have only 2,000 Enterprise Ireland jobs in County Laois, which represents only one in six of the entire midlands region. Both outfits are ignoring County Laois.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-06-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:47+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-10