Mr. Seán Coughlan:

I will touch on a couple of the questions. The question was asked about developments with the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. We have seen significant interest within the Department at a political level and we are unsure at a departmental level where things stand. It is interesting that from what we have heard, it appears we need no more than two or three civil servants within the Department to be assigned to this in order to allow it to happen. It is a sizeable Department and there is a large cadre of civil servants in it. From the outside, using two to three civil servants does not seem like a massive ask.

There are no formal developments on the political side yet but in the jobs plan a report was commissioned by Forfás to report on the potential for social enterprise around job creation. That is with the Government but it has not yet been published. That will contain a series of recommendations and we met personnel from Forfás when it drafted the report and gave our perspective, as did others on the social enterprise and entrepreneurship task force. We are hopeful that this will be largely positive and we are awaiting developments.

This leads to questions about the enterprise boards and whether we will brief them. We would jump at such a chance. If we brief the boards, it would be one conversation, but if we go with representatives of the Department, with the idea that it is part of our remit to perform such briefings, it would be a very different conversation in changing the thinking around enterprise boards. The two ideas are linked in that sense.

I may be incorrect and I am happy to be corrected but my information is that social enterprise has many legal structures but credit unions are precluded from investing in organisations with charitable status or companies limited by guarantee with no shared capital. Those are two particular legal structures. Credit unions, as far as I am aware, cannot lend to those specific types of structures and institutions. The real challenge is that the vast majority of credit unions are set up in those structures. Although there are ways in which credit unions can lend to social enterprises, the movement is probably not open to the vast majority of social enterprises, which is a challenge.

The question on mergers and acquisitions was very interesting. My day job is chief executive of Social Entrepreneurs Ireland and I am also chairman of The Wheel, a national representative body for the community and voluntary sector. It is one of the organisations in the community and voluntary pillar in discussions with the Government. We have many discussions about this not just in social entrepreneurship but in the wider sector. There are challenges and we referred earlier to organisations not being personality-led. One of the challenges around mergers and acquisitions is that if the process is personality-led, a person may feel it is personal rather than the right thing to do. There are some cultural or attitude challenges around that.

We have seen some very positive examples, with one of the effects of the current economic climate being that those conversations are coming more to the fore. We had Volunteer Centres Ireland and Volunteer Ireland as an example. I know people involved in both and they have been very clear about the difference between them. Unless one ate, drank and slept volunteering, they nevertheless looked very similar from the outside. In a positive action, they merged into one organisation to promote volunteering in this country. Those sorts of example must become more common; we spoke of the importance of role models in social entrepreneurship but role models in this area would also be very beneficial. There are challenges in merging because of much organisational cost. One must work through negotiations and if we are really interested in promoting this process, it might be good to have a fund to support mergers and acquisitions. It would get people interested.

There was a question on procurement and EU laws. We must be in compliance with EU regulations. If we include social clauses in the tendering process, the likelihood is that organisations that can meet those social clauses or score highly in them are more likely to be indigenous rather than organisations outside the State. They will understand the context, and social clauses are all about local social issues. That might be a way of at least encouraging companies in competitively tendering while doing good in the world.

There is the idea of making this fun. Senators should understand from our comments that we are passionate about this process and we believe in it because we see the results. We get up every morning and look forward to going to work. We try to speak about this; we are doing it in this forum but we can also do that in the media. We must get around what we call being worthy but dull, WBD.

Change Nation, for example, was a huge event in that sense. It created energy, excitement and enthusiasm, and Paul O'Hara and Ashoka Ireland did an amazing job. The fun element comes into that category. We have to start projecting that while it is all good, it is a great journey as well. There are many very interesting organisations among young people. There is the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which the One Foundation has supported. It is doing great work in getting young people, particularly in transition year, to think about setting up their own micro businesses. There is also Young Social Innovators which was set up by Sr. Stanislaus Kennedy, one of Ireland's great social entrepreneurs. It has a 50% footprint in secondary schools throughout the country. Initiatives such as those should be encouraged.

The last issue was opportunities in terms of the State and the private sector coming together. The One Foundation has shown real leadership in this. Perhaps Deirdre would discuss it. From my perspective and from the examples I am aware of anecdotally, one of the things that One Foundation has done very successfully, along with Atlantic Philanthropies, is use that combination of private and State money on the basis of a clear strategic plan in terms of what it wants to be achieved and invest it in the performing organisations rather than the ones that are struggling, because that is where one will get results. It has been able to broker those co-investments. That brokerage function is critical to maximising the benefit we get from the investment. Does Deirdre wish to comment?