Ms Wendy Gray:

The youth fund is based on the premise that targeted supports at untapped potential within society can be very effective in the way that the female entrepreneurship push from Enterprise Ireland has been hugely successful in drawing out many female entrepreneurs to access State supports. The State supports are available anyway but there are certain cohorts of people who do not access them. The idea is to have a targeted and tailored set of supports for youth involving various workshops that would be held on business planning, developing marketing skills, sales, IT and the range of skills required by entrepreneurs. They would eventually go on to be supported in terms of either doing a bank loan application, getting grant funding from the local enterprise offices, LEOs, Bord Fáilte, Enterprise Ireland or Microfinance Ireland. Microfinance Ireland would team up with them because as they are start-up companies they may not qualify for bank lending, therefore, they would get a microfinance loan of less than €25,000 to start the business.

The other angle is that after they have received the loan they should continue to get ongoing mentoring from the LEOs. It is a questioning of targeting State support to drive more youth entrepreneurship and to give them the soft supports.