Pat Breen (Clare, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As members will know, a key objective of Government policy is supporting increased levels of research, development and innovation in Ireland based in companies. Innovation is central to Ireland's competitiveness and to the ability of companies based in Ireland to compete internationally. The job of Enterprise Ireland, as part of the wider enterprise supporting role, is to help maintain and drive innovation in Irish industry. It achieves this by developing in-company research and development facilities and by leveraging external assets, such as the higher education system.

My Department, together with Enterprise Ireland, has considered a number of measures aimed at driving an increase in research and development. These measures include a number of proposed amendments to Enterprise Ireland's governing legislation, four in total, to increase its ability to support research and development in a number of critical sectors. It is my intention to introduce these four research and development-related amendments on Report Stage.

If I may, I will give a brief outline of their objectives. One is to permit Enterprise Ireland to support research and development in the horticulture sector for the first time. Second, it will facilitate grants to support research activity overseas, where research needs cannot be met in Ireland. That is important as well. Third, it will increase the flexibility of Enterprise Ireland to award grants, within permissible EU research and development grant rates, and a fourth amendment will allow the agency to make advance partial payments of research and development grants to firms that may be experiencing cashflow restrictions during research, development and innovation, RDI, projects.

The proposed changes are deemed necessary in light of Government policy to drive an increase in RDI and related activity across our indigenous enterprise base, as well as the challenges of business posed by the Brexit decision. In addition it is important that Enterprise Ireland can flexibly deploy the widest degree of interventions to assist indigenous industry that match supports available for other countries, particularly now in the context of Brexit.

In addition to those four research and development-related amendments, I also intend to put forward amendments to give Enterprise Ireland powers to use certain additional lending investment instruments in certain circumstances. This is medium to long-term debt being proposed to help scale client companies in the form of convertible loan notes and non-convertible debt instruments. The amendments will also propose to permit certain types of follow-on investments without having to fully meet the enterprise development criteria, set out in current legislation. These additional powers will increase the flexibility to support enterprise development and to manage those investments on a par with private sector investors. My officials are currently working on these amendments with the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel and I hope to be in a position to bring them forward at a later stage.