Mr. Sean O'Sullivan:

I will respond to the last issue raised first. In respect of mentoring and 80% being unpaid and 20% being paid, I use that percentage because it seems that the State's current preference is the other way, with 80% being funded and 20% being done on a volunteer basis. I think we should turn the tables on that. The entrepreneur who succeeds is the entrepreneur who learns the fastest. The people who know how to teach an entrepreneur how to succeed in business are not necessarily those in the mentoring community but other entrepreneurs. The other entrepreneurs do not have a great deal of time to help on this but they do so any way.

There are organisations such as the Entrepreneurs' Organisation Ireland, EO, Techpreneurs and other organisations. As I mentioned, there is the officehours.iewebsite, to which hundreds of entrepreneurs will be signed up by the end of the year, offering thousands of hours a month in free mentoring. We hope to rejuvenate that atmosphere of volunteerism, which is so prevalent in other aspects of Irish life such as sports coaching and so on but is not as prevalent in business coaching.