More attention needs to be paid to businesses and industry in the middle tier of employers in the county, Castlebar Town Council was told last week. Tom Canavan on behalf of Castlebar Chamber of Commerce gave the council a wide ranging and comprehensive presentation about job creation.
He informed the members that in Mayo there are seven companies who employ 250 people or more and between them they employ 4,079 people in the county. But there are also 422 businesses in the county that employ between 10 and 250 people, which employ a total of 11,910 people, more than double that of the seven big employers. Mr Canavan said: “We think that these businesses have been off the radar up to now and that there has been a focus on start-ups from the County Enterprise Board. We think that it’s a lot easier to go from 10 employees to 12, rather than from none to two.”
Mr Canavan also told the meeting that there were up to 20 different state agencies working in the county with a remit for job creation, but they were all working on different areas and people who had enterprise ideas often found they didn’t know which one of a number of the agencies to go to with their idea or project.
