Mr. Kevin Sherry:

I thank the committee for inviting us. I am joined by my colleague, Mark Christal, manager of our regions and entrepreneurship division. Enterprise Ireland's remit is to support companies engaged in manufacturing and internationally-traded services. We also have a responsibility as an organisation for foreign direct investment, FDI, in the food and natural resources area. The majority of companies with which we deal are SMEs across a wide range of sectors located in every village and town in Ireland. Our focus is on helping those companies to start, develop their business and grow internationally.

We have ten offices around the country and work in close partnership at local level with a range of enterprise development partners, including local enterprise offices, business innovation centres and the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland. Funding for those bodies comes through Enterprise Ireland. In addition, we administer on the direction of Government various schemes, the most recent example of which is the online retail scheme introduced to support retailers to bring their businesses online. At the centre of everything we do as an organisation is helping companies to build scale and expand their reach. That is a focus of our 2020 strategy, which aims to help companies to create 60,000 new jobs by 2020 from the existing record level of just under 210,000; increase exports to €27 billion; increase annual spend in Ireland by an additional €4 billion, and inspire more companies with global ambition to scale their businesses, including Netwatch, a company to which Senator Ó Céidigh referred. I am pleased to note that in 2017, the companies we work with experienced record employment growth of close to 210,000 direct jobs. There was almost the same increase again in indirect employment. That involved the creation of 10,300 net jobs. That employment growth was experienced across all regions, counties and sectors. We have 33 offices around the globe and they support our clients to build their exports. Exports were at a record level of €22.7 million in 2017, which represented an increase of 7% on 2016. Importantly, we have been focused with clients recently on diversifying their businesses. We have seen clients reduce their dependency on the UK, which is our closest market, from 45% to 34% over the past ten years.

Our work in the start-up area is about assisting entrepreneurs to realise their ambitions. Through our new frontiers programme and 14 institutes of technology nationally, we have supported 326 years over the past two years. We have also supported 91 businesses and start-ups through our competitive start fund and 90 businesses through our high-potential start-up fund. Innovation is at the centre of most companies and we have assisted clients to build their innovative capacity. We have supported more than 100 companies in terms of spend in excess of €100,000. We have also approved funding for 436 innovation partnerships in technology gateways throughout the country in 2017 and provided financial support for over 1,000 collaborative innovations between industry and higher level education organisations. At the beginning of 2018, we launched an agile support under research and development to respond quickly to the needs of companies that are innovating and to provide them with support.

On market diversification, which is about spreading companies' risks across export markets, one of the key activities Enterprise Ireland is involved in is helping companies win new customers in international markets. It is critical to get that first customer and we helped in excess of 1,300 companies secure new contracts in export markets in 2017 and helped 350 companies establish new presences in international markets. We also brought 870 international buyers to the country to encourage and help them secure business from Irish companies in 2017. At the beginning of this year, we launched a new support to help companies further drive their exports and internationalise their business and that was called the new market discovery fund. That is to accelerate companies' efforts in trying to diversify their business with the pressures from Brexit. Competitiveness is important in that area and it is critical that we help companies maintain their competitiveness, not just in Ireland but internationally. In 2015, we collaborated with the local enterprise offices to pilot a lean offer for them for smaller businesses and I am pleased that the number of companies that have gone through that programme now exceeds 1,100 so that has now gone mainstream. We also launched a new operational excellence offer at the beginning of this year.

On regional business ecosystems, we work closely with our parent Department on new schemes. The new regional economic development fund, REDF, under which the Government committed €60 million, was launched last year . There were two calls in that, the first of which allocated €30 million to regional initiatives and the second of which was for 21 successful projects around the country. The second call is well advanced at the moment and is currently being assessed.

There are many challenges facing SMEs and we have set them out in our submission to the committee. I highlight two that are currently relevant, namely Brexit and attracting skills and getting good people.

On Brexit, we have done much work as an organisation, not just for our clients but for companies to help them prepare for Brexit. We launched a Brexit scorecard with which companies can self-assess their exposure to Brexit and more than 3,190 companies have completed that to date. Actions emerged from that to help them respond to Brexit and better prepare themselves. We also provide grant support in that area and we have been undertaking Brexit roadshows around the country, both national roadshows and Enterprise Ireland roadshows. In excess of 940 participant companies in that area attended the roadshows. The roadshows are focused on helping companies to identify the issues in their business that they particularly face and then to respond and act on the initiatives. We back up that information in support of companies and take action on the areas of risk that they have identified.

Attracting and retaining skills is critical to SMEs and we are in the fortunate position now where unemployment levels are much lower than they were five to ten years ago, particularly five years ago. What has been critical for those companies is that recently we launched an initiative called Spotlight on Skills, for example, which is a workshop to help companies identify their own skills needs and to develop a plan for addressing same. To date, we have engaged with 140 companies on those skills workshops, representing 16,500 employees. That helps them to prepare to secure the skills that they need today and that they will need to develop their business in the future and helps existing employees within the business, as the Senator has indicated, to grow their own capabilities.