Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will try to answer those questions as best I can, working through them in reverse order.

I am afraid I am not the competent person to answer the Deputy's last question about the security of telecommunications because it is beyond my expertise and above my pay grade, but I will get him a note on the matter. A lot of the work we invest in with our technological companies, including through ESA contracts, are in that sphere, but I cannot give the Deputy an answer to his question because it does not fall within the remit of our Department. I will get him a note on the matter, no problem, because it is a relevant question to ask. It is funny that none of the various investors we have met who are choosing to locate here or to expand their business operations here has ever asked that question. It is certainly a relevant one.

As to how the country has benefited from the various contracts through the ESA, I will outline a few businesses for Deputy Stanton and I have no problem dropping him a note on them. I will not outline the money we allocate to each company because that is commercially sensitive information, but I have no problem giving the Deputy information on the applications of some of the successful companies over the years. If it is okay with you, Chair, I will go through some of them now. I will take Cork first, seeing as Deputy Stanton is from County Cork. There is PMD Solutions in Cork. It has developed a patient monitoring system called Corona-RS. It will be used by healthcare professionals, using satellite technology to monitor the health status of patients in the community who are suffering the effects of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses. That is a very useful intervention. Another company also, as it turns out, based in Cork - it is just a coincidence that they are listed here - is Treemetrics. It has secured funding to develop a new platform to enable the production of forest certification and carbon verification standards. That will really help not just Ireland but the world to deal with the effects of climate change and to try to assert a baseline in that area. Ubotica Technologies, in Dublin, got a contract to incorporate its artificial intelligence technology to enable the first ever hardware-accelerated artificial intelligence inference of data in an orbit satellite. It is contributing to space, so, while it does not benefit Ireland directly, it has a role in that regard. There is a spend of more than €350 billion in space technology annually. That is what the sector is worth and we want a share of that corporate spend. I will give the Deputy another example. A Galway company won three technology development activities and highly competitive ESA tenders relating to optical satellite communications. Again, all the communications technology used in space ends up being useful to us in our technology development as well. I am happy to send the Deputy my list rather going through all the details now. It might have been included in the briefing - I am not sure - but I will certainly send it to him as well. As it turns out, there are three more Cork companies listed, he will be delighted to know. I can come back to this at the end of the committee meeting if he would like me to do so. These companies are useful.

To respond to the question about the innovation fund and what we are trying to achieve with it, Deputy Stanton has correctly identified that as companies grow and expand and as some of them try to start, access to investment money, equity and capital to expand, as opposed to borrowings, is an issue. This is not just an Irish issue. It is something we have worked a lot on over recent years. There are quite a few stakeholders with which Enterprise Ireland engages to try to match up companies for private investment as well as Enterprise Ireland using its own funds, but there are always gaps in the market. As I said earlier, with the application for funding of €350 million from Enterprise Ireland, it could accommodate only €70 million of that, and there are different levels of intervention and different stages of companies' growth. That fund tries to focus mainly on the seed capital and start-ups. The Deputy mentioned other companies that want to expand and grow. Through our SME task force, we want to encourage those companies that stay in Ireland to secure the investment here and to be able to locate in Ireland and to create jobs here. It is an issue for Ireland and Europe that there are companies we lose. Stripe is an example of a company that originally could not source the investment it needed in Ireland and relocated to the US to source investment. We do not want to see that happen again. That does not mean we have the funds to invest in every company, but we are trying to build up these funds. Our Department's investment of €33 million, matched with the European Investment Bank's €30 million and the ISIF money, gives us a €90 million fund, which will then draw down other funds and possibly help us to secure investment in companies of over €160 million if it all multiplies correctly. That is what we are trying to achieve. We are trying to find solutions to exactly the situations to which Deputy Stanton referred. This is for start-ups but we will work on other solutions as well. We have other offerings but we want to expand these offerings.

The tax system is a major issue when it comes to attracting investment and funds. There is a tax commission set up into which our Department will feed and which will look at all these issues of taxation that would encourage or discourage investment in companies and services. That is something we will try to do. We want to see as many companies as possible stay in Irish ownership but, more important, to keep the jobs in Ireland. The Deputy has flagged this and we will continue to work on it.