Mr. Frank Ryan:

I thank the Deputy. In overall terms, in terms of where we are now in funding, we are not going back to the old model that was heavily debt-based. I cannot see the banks going back to that. The progress that has been made in the past 18 months has been significant in terms of the funding that has been made available for SMEs. I refer to microfinance loans, the credit guarantee, and the very active involvement of our parent Department, the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, with the Department of Finance and the National Pensions Reserve Fund. The size of the new funds to help SMEs is of note. The SME equity fund recently announced by the NPRF was €300 million. The better capital fund is €100 million. The small credit fund is €540 million. One should note in particular the SMEs that need to restructure on the work of AIB and the European Investment Fund, EIF. The funds are all to be welcomed. The Government announcement that Enterprise Ireland is to receive €175 million for investment will leverage the funds further. Perhaps the places that people in the past have looked for financing is changing. Business angels will be far more important as regards matched funding. There will be a different way of funding one’s company in the future.

Worldwide, the exit mechanism for most high potential growth companies is through trade sale. There are very few IPOs worldwide. We lost a fair number of companies out of our portfolio that went into the portfolio of IDA Ireland through the acquisition of the companies here. Cúram, our largest software company, was bought some time ago by IBM. ChangingWorlds was bought by Amdocs. Havok Inc. was bought by Intel. It is a very active market. We are now producing the quality of companies in this country that someone wants to buy. There is a certain acid test associated with that which is welcome, although we would like to see more Irish companies IPOing, as set out in the Action Plan for Jobs and we hope to see the ecosystem for that in place by the end of this year.

Innovation vouchers are a bit bureaucratic, but at the end of the day it is taxpayers’ money and we must be able to appear before the Committee of Public Accounts and say something has been done properly and the money has been expended properly.

I would like to think that as the universities get more accustomed to doing innovation vouchers - it is the institutes of education, IOTs, that have led this - the system will become simpler when it is more regular and familiar. We would like more universities to engage in innovation vouchers because it has been a successful intervention to date. Mr. May might wish to add to that.