Ms Pauline Mulligan:

I will reiterate some of the points I made earlier about the support from the enterprise agencies, in particular additional funding through the enterprise agencies. We secured a 10% increase in our capital budget for this year, as well as additional current funding for up to 50 staff between Enterprise Ireland and the IDA. It has been a mix of additional funding for the agencies and the development of the schemes I spoke about in reaction to the currency impacts companies are experiencing, such as the development of proposals around a working capital scheme. It is a short-term guarantee scheme similar to the agriculture scheme. You spoke earlier about the impacts on the agri sector, in particular. That scheme was rolled out last year by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine through the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland, SBCI. We are now looking at the development of a scheme on a whole-of-economy basis for companies most impacted. It would be a short-term scheme rolled out through the SBCI. Work is under way in the Department on developing that.

The other matter we are working on is scoping out the need for a longer-term business development loan scheme, again for the companies most impacted.

They are the two issues. Finally, we are considering scoping the idea of a financial advisory hub for SMEs. That is in development. It is based on the research and analysis carried out on the companies most impacted in the short term and which will have the most impacts from Brexit in the medium term.

John Callinan spoke about the next phase in terms of detailing all of the mitigation actions that are under way and planned. That will be the next step.