Professor Willie Donnelly:

I know Deputy Connolly has a deep interest, as do I, in taxpayer moneys and the impact of investing in these spin-outs. What is the impact on and return for the State? We have to look at the broader return. All of these are payments to the State. We have the €1.5 million. The other thing is that we have paid capital gains tax of €68 million. The company itself employs 63 people and will employ 120 people in an employment black spot. Those people pay tax to the State. Enterprise Ireland got a return on its investment. If we were to work out a return on investment taking in all of the ways in which the State receives return on investment from these companies, we would find that it is huge.

We need to be very careful because creating our own indigenous industries is crucial to the protection of this country. Yesterday, the President of the USA said that he is looking at multinational activity abroad and how to pull the multinationals back. The platform that Red Hat is using globally is called FeedHenry. The intellect which is building that platform is in Waterford. This protects Irish jobs from being moved back to the United States because they do not have real value. These jobs are creating real value and are creating income for the State in many different ways. The return on investment in this case, and in lots of others, is much greater than the investment put in by the State in the two research projects that generated the intellectual property, IP, that created the company.