Rural Ireland is often defined through the “prism of agricultural farming” but that is not the full the story when it comes to jobs in rural Ireland anymore, according to the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.
Minister Simon Coveney told a Fine Gael special conference focused on agricultural and rural Ireland today (Saturday, November 18) that “you don’t have to be farming or involved in the food industry to actually develop a career in rural parts of Ireland anymore”.
Speaking at the conference in Co. Kildare he said tourism had also become a hugely “important driver across many of our rural and coastal regions”.
“We’re now seeing opportunities in tech, in communications, in pharma and biopharma, in medical devices as well as of course agriculture, tourism and much more besides and we’ll continue to do that and we’ll continue to to talk up those opportunities,” Minister Coveney said.
He said that Fine Gael, as a party, wanted to hear what people wanted in different rural parts of the country to make sure those businesses “survive into the future”.
The former minister for agriculture also stressed that it “will not allow an urban, rural divide in terms of opportunity for our young people”.
He told delegates who attended the conference in Maynooth that his party wanted to ensure that “young people who want to work in their home parish, play in their local GAA club get a decent job and a decent wage”.
Minister Coveney also referred to the role his colleague, the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Simon Harris, has played to “invest heavily in the new technological universities across regions of the country that simply didn’t have a university in the past that now were starting to see the benefit of it”.
Separately Minister Harris had also emphasised at the conference how new apprenticeship schemes were also delivering new opportunities for young people in rural communities who may not have wanted to go university and now had other other options.
Both Minister Coveney and his cabinet colleague, the Minister for Rural and Community Development, Heather Humphreys, were keen to highlight at the conference today that their party had “insisted on rolling out fibre broadband to into every building in the country, regardless of where it is and how hard it is to get to”.
According to Minister Humphreys this has been a “game changer for rural communities”.
She said this together with the 330 remote working hubs that have been developed throughout the country has “breathed new life into rural Ireland”.