Mr. Sean O'Sullivan:

To respond to the question on celebrating or recognising failure, it was good to ask whether this is a cultural value or not. When I first came to Ireland, I was invited to be on the board of advisers for a new start-up company and gathered around me was a board of illustrious business leaders. The entrepreneur made a passionate pitch about how he saw the world in a new way. I was sort of flabbergasted after hearing this great ten-minute pitch on this new vision for the world. The business being proposed was the type of business that had been successful in other parts of Europe and the entrepreneur was trying to bring the business to Ireland.

However, the first question asked by one of those around the table was: "Have you looked at where this has failed?" Everyone around the table thought it was a good question and wished they had asked it. I was flabbergasted to be sitting in a boardroom of advisers where the first thing being done, whether consciously or unconsciously, was tearing the idea down. They were looking at failure first. This reminds me of when I was learning to drive. One is supposed to look ahead when driving, but I was looking at what was immediately in front. I was at the edge of a bridge and was looking at the bridge and wondering whether I was going to drive into the water. I was driving the car into the bridge, rather than driving straight ahead. Looking in wrong direction and looking towards failure is a way to get towards failure. We do that a lot as part of our culture.

How can we fix this? A significant amount can be done through peer mentoring and learning. The people who win the game of start-ups are the people who learn the fastest and who accept failure as part of the process. There is a reason for calling our programme Strengthening the Startup Community. By having a real community, we help each other learn. This sounds almost goody-goody. What does learning in community have to do with entrepreneurship and capitalism? They are actually married to each other. We must accept that the business community must be more community orientated and more giving. This is a cultural value we need to continue to refine in Ireland.

The third area asked about was finance and capital gains tax and whether we had costed this. We did not cost this. We understand the Government has tremendous difficulty in raising enough taxes to pay for the debt burden we have as a country. This is the conflict. Do we want to create jobs or do we want to service the debt. I believe we must do both. I do not have a great answer to the question, other than to say that raising the capital gains tax rate either drives businesses out of the country or drives them to devising new strategies to cheat the tax system out of its capital gains tax, which is completely legal here and will be done. In this situation, using tax avoidance schemes means Ireland gets less capital gains tax than it would get if it had a lower capital gains tax. If anyone has other questions on this, I would be glad to enlighten them on how people are being advised by accountants and lawyers in regard to how not to be required to pay capital gains tax in Ireland.