The Government has published their Action Plan for Jobs 2016, which aims to create 50,000 extra jobs over the next twelve months, with Enterprise Ireland giving the plan their full support.

Enterprise Ireland, the Government Agency for supporting the development of Irish indigenous business internationally, announced that it is fully committed to continuing to support Irish businesses to grow and create new jobs to meet the targets set out in the Action Plan.

2015 was a record year for job creation by the agency's client companies, with 10,000 net new jobs created. The goal is create 50,000 net new jobs in 2016, with 200,000 net new jobs overall by 2020.

This will bring unemployment down to 6%, which the coalition considers to be "full unemployment", but only twelve months ago the target set for this level of national unemployment was 2018.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny denies that this two-year delay translates as a watered down version of unemployment plans, stating that these new numbers also consist of recruiting 70,000 people who had previously emigrated from the country and bringing them back home to jobs here.

Enterprise Ireland companies are aiming to create 13,000 new jobs in 2016 alone, with 16,000 new jobs set to be created within IDA companies, and over 4,000 new jobs within the Local Enterprise offices.

The 2016 plan outlines several hundred actions to be implemented this year by sixteen departments and over sixty agencies, with some of the major actions including all Governmental transactions to be made available online by 2017, funding schemes in R&D and regional job growth, and targeting new jobs specifically within the bio-economy and audio-visual sectors.

Enterprise Ireland CEO Julie Sinnamon said: “The launch of the Action Plan for Jobs 2016 is a very important strategy which sets out a series of targeted actions across a range of industry sectors and Government agencies to support the creation of 50,000 new jobs in 2016."