Áine Collins (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the witnesses for their work on this subject, which is long overdue. Mr. O’Sullivan knows that I have been interested in this area for quite a while. I agree that it must start with education policy. The witnesses are familiar with the secondary school programme run by Jerry Kennelly in Tralee. That should have become a national programme but it needs to start at an earlier age, right at the beginning. There have been some inroads into that but not enough.

If there is to be a success story from the Celtic tiger years it will be that our attitude to failure might change. It has cost us a fortune. Let us hope that it might change. We have to change. The attitude is appalling. I have seen over and over how, when businesses fail, the people involved are mortified and feel they cannot put their heads above the parapet.

While I agree with Mr. O’Sullivan about mentoring, he knows I have different views because I think we need State support in that too. It needs to be done differently and with closed connected platforms where mentors can share information because the information is not captured. No value has been placed on the mentoring done here for several years. That is a big problem. We pay approximately €8.5 million to mentors, apart from the cost of delivering the mentoring programme. We paid €23.5 million to what were local enterprise offices and much of their work was to deliver mentoring but we have no report to say how much of that converted into jobs. We need to change our approach. That is ongoing following a recent report on Forfás initiated by this committee. We hope to see some changes in this area.

In last year’s budget capital gains tax was reduced to 16.5% for entrepreneurs.