Mr. John Murphy:

I will take Senator Quinn's questions first. The area of state aid is a bit like procurement where people say they have the impression that no small company can get a contract. Likewise they will say they have the impression that things are done much more easily in every other country. It is only when one goes to meetings in other countries that one realises everybody is saying this, so they cannot all be right.

As regards whether we are stricter or more lax in applying State aids, for better or worse the Irish public service applies the law. As regards EU matters, when we have been found not to have applied the law the penalties are severe. For example, the penalties for late transposition of EU directives, which usually happens for valid domestic legislative reasons, are severe with daily fines.

This joint committee is the first place in which we would be chastised for not having applied the law correctly had we exposed the Irish State or companies to litigation because of failure to apply the law.

As for small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs, there are standard definitions of SMEs depending on the nature of the regulation. It is either less than 250 or less than 500 employees. In our domestic programmes such as, for example, the suite of programmes that Enterprise Ireland runs, we distinguish between micro-enterprises, scaling-up companies, companies we are seeking to get into export markets and then the larger companies and try to tailor the support offered to match their circumstances. I fully agree with the Senator's comment that we wish to see small companies find ways of growing. One of the challenges in Ireland is to prevent small companies that get to a certain size from sitting back and being comfortable with that but to think of ways they can go, including getting into export markets in cases where they might have been happy enough to stay within the Irish and United Kingdom markets. Instead, the challenge is for them to think about going further afield. We work very intensively, for example, with Enterprise Ireland on trade missions and we will identify the group of companies or the sector that can best benefit from that kind of intervention. We use our Minister and other Ministers, as appropriate, to head up these missions and over the past year or two, we have increased substantially the amount of such work that we are doing.

On regulation, there are exemptions for SMEs. Generally speaking, a company that goes beyond that threshold ought to have the capacity to deal with the aspect of regulation from which it previously had been exempted. That is a reasonable general proposition that is applied across different types of regulations. This is the principle that we apply in company law on the requirements for different levels of information and so on.

As for professional qualifications, I am unsure whether I have the detail on that issue to hand but will find it. The Senator asked about how long it takes to agree something like this and I note some of these items pertaining to a common passport for different aspects of industry have been on the European Union's agenda for years. However, one need only consider how long it has taken to pursue certain reforms domestically for some of the professions to consider how much more difficult it would be across 27 countries. I will be happy to get the details of the professional card for the Senator.