Mary White (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am fascinated by this discussion, which is very close to my own heart because I know it is the small and medium indigenous companies that will provide the employment opportunities for our young people. I had the honour of being an adjudicator for the Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the year competition, which I was delighted to do. The transition year students in a school in Buncrana, County Donegal were encouraged by their teachers to make products and approximately 200 children did so. Their teachers asked me how they could get these children to become entrepreneurs and to become self-sufficient. Donegal people are extraordinarily self-sufficient and enterprising. The school in Buncrana was looking for a solution and a way to move forward. The children were so excited, as were their parents and grandparents, who had helped them to make their products. It was fascinating.

I agree with everything that has been said but to cut to the chase and be political, I was shocked when Deputy Richard Bruton announced in the Seanad, several months ago, that the enterprise boards were to be subsumed into the local authorities. That was an absolutely crazy idea. The enterprise boards employ fewer than ten people and should have been merged with Enterprise Ireland. While I do not wish to insult people in local authorities, it is not in their nature to be enterprising. They are bureaucrats and they do not have the vision needed to support people with good ideas who come before them looking for assistance. Those in local authorities have no clue what it is like to set up or run a business and the same is true of those working in the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. They are not entrepreneurs. They are bureaucrats, although some of them are extremely good at what they do. I was a member of the first Dublin City Enterprise Board. As Mr. O'Keeffe has said, there are enormous opportunities for people to set up businesses but not if they come up against a bureaucratic stone wall. People come to the boards full of excitement about their projects. They have a vision of what they want to do and are innocent in their self confidence. When my business partner and I started, we did not know what we were facing into. We had to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 16 years. We worked on weekends, Christmas Day, New Year's Day and so forth and if we had not, the business would have collapsed. That business now employs 200 people. It was a labour of love for me, to see people getting jobs. Enterprise is in the Irish nature, which is obvious from the fact that so many do well when they go abroad. We are very independent-minded and do not have that Anglo or German mentality of wanting to do what we are told. Entrepreneurship suits the Irish mentality.

I found today's presentation very exciting and I wish the delegates continued success. We are very privileged to have so much foreign direct investment here but we must drive our recovery ourselves too.