Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Ms Sinnamon and her team and congratulate her on a productive year as well as Enterprise Ireland's ongoing work. Everyone in Enterprise Ireland works incredibly hard for Team Ireland here and abroad and I wish it continued success.

I have specific and general questions. To start with specifics, Ms Sinnamon stated that Enterprise Ireland received sanction to appoint 20 new staff in high-growth markets. Where are those staff and are they fully in place? How many were placed in China?

The CECs and business development managers represent a good innovation. How many of those positions have been filled and has Enterprise Ireland given consideration to sharing that role between a number of CECs? I get the sense that some of the CECs are drifting and are not doing what they could be or fulfilling their potential because the people running them are doing too much else in their communities. While the position of business development manager is welcome, would we get more bang for our buck if it was shared?

Will Ms Sinnamon update us on the LEOs? Mr. Hayes has been in and out to the committee and beaten around the issue often. He has taken many bullets for the Enterprise Ireland team about the new role of LEOs. Our concern, which remains light, is that the fantastic work being done by Enterprise Ireland is far removed from the CEBs. A client going to a CEB would have thought a HPSU was a drug. Clients want to expand their businesses and provide services in their communities without exporting. Will Ms Sinnamon assure the committee that she is aware of this difference? I pay tribute to the former Minister of State, Deputy Perry, for his work in rolling out the LEOs, but will Ms Sinnamon also assure us that the type of client I cited will still be at the heart of the LEO? We all want people to export and we want technology, and some of us visited UCC's Tyndall National Institute to see some of the research to which Ms Sinnamon referred, but there are still people who just want to start a business. Someone must have an interest in them.

Last year, there was an issue with audit reports on Enterprise Ireland's programmes in the south east. Has it been resolved and are new processes in place?

There has been a quadrupling of losses in investor companies since last year, with Enterprise Ireland making a €16.8 million loss. Ms Sinnamon might assert that this was in line with various investments, but why was the jump so large? Was a particular focus put on investments that year, did Enterprise Ireland decide on a clean-out or was there a higher rate of losses in its investments as opposed to in previous years?