Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

In response to Senator Quinn and as I noted in my opening remarks, I am trying to create a culture of independence rather than dependence and all the State can do is to facilitate this. It is doing so through a plethora of organisations, of which there are too many. While organisations such as Enterprise Ireland often extol the virtues of enterprise boards, they do not have the requisite resources to invest to assist people, to mentor and to monitor. I consider mentoring to be a hugely important aspect of work at local level which all local government bodies and State agencies have failed to do. While there are many people with good ideas, they do not know where to go and even if they do, they find bureaucracy at local or national level to be alien to them. Financial institutions also play an important part in this programme of creating the culture of entrepreneurship at local or any level and as people are quite shy about how one might prepare and present a business proposal to a financial institution, mentoring in that sense is equally important. The Government has put in place a range of structures, as near as possible to the citizen in order that they are as informal as possible, through which it is trying to provide a helping hand to those who have ideas and at least are given a fair run at the various financial institutions and State agencies to get some support. Obviously, however, it will not be done unless they get up in the morning and do it themselves. I think the days of believing that government can do everything for one went out a good while ago. Equally, the idea that one can depend on an organised community group to do everything for one will be difficult because they will not have the same level of resources as heretofore. Consequently, we need all structures to be in place in a rationalised sense and to come together in a one-stop-shop way to help someone with an idea. My philosophy is if we can achieve this, we will have done a lot to make sure that whatever funds are available are going towards providing a little assistance to people to give them initial support to get their projects off the ground. Ultimately, they hopefully will become independent entities thereafter.