Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The fund absolutely has to have, as the Minister said earlier, a commercial focus and there must be a commercial return. I limited my remarks earlier when I proposed the amendment to the requirement to invest in our indigenous SME base because it is not as productive as the SME base of the countries we like to compare ourselves to. It is not as competitive or innovative and with the challenges with foreign direct investment in the future, we have to have a specific remit in that regard and we need to focus the fund on that challenge. It is also a regional development challenge. The implication is that we are investing in high potential firms, arguably unicorn-type firms that are sometimes hard to come by and high potential start-ups that Enterprise Ireland is always on the lookout for. Other enterprise agencies across Europe have different kinds of investment funds to ours and are successful at it - we cannot assume we will always be - in a competitive investment environment globally. I stand over this. We need a specific focus on what we use these funds for, namely indigenous SME investment.