Mr. Garrett Murray:

There are two points I want to follow up on. The first is on the 50 plus posts. As Mr. Sherry said, we have to confirm the number. I referred to boots on the ground earlier and it is important when we are talking about additional resources to note that it is about having resources here to support companies to prepare to go overseas and about having people overseas to help them in the market. That is where the innovation and competitiveness piece comes in, to be clear.

Second, tax is an important pillar, particularly with the mobile nature of entrepreneurship. We were happy to see an enhancement of the capital gains regime for entrepreneurs but as Mr. Sherry rightly points out that is not all we are looking for. We also welcome the changes to the foreign-earnings deduction, or FED. One of the challenges our companies have is that when one is diversifying into foreign markets, one has to get one of one's employees here to go over and do the hard work before one puts a presence full-time on the ground. FED is a way to incentivise companies to do that. The amendments to that in the budget were welcome.

During the lifetime of the previous Dáil, the Minister for Finance launched a consultation exercise on taxation for entrepreneurship. We had a number of things in there. One was on share options as announced for next year in the budget. We welcome that because our companies cannot compete with larger companies in terms of share options. Attracting talent is as critical if not more critical than other tax elements in the budget. If one is an international expert or CTO with a particular skill set who is looking across Europe for a place to locate, any place that does not have a competitive share options scheme will not be at the races. We really welcome the fact that one will be introduced in 2018.

On EIIS, while it is important to look at the entrepreneur coming out and at what he or she is getting in terms of capital gain, attracting money into companies is also critical. In looking at the relative competitiveness of the UK, we should also be looking at the EIS versus the EIIS as well as the capital regimes. We have stated publicly that when there is fiscal space, this is an area on which we would like to see further concentration.