Mr. Leo Clancy:

In a moment, I will hand over to my colleague, Dr. Gibbons, who will address the issue of the geographical spread of LEOs and the lean for micro and green for micro schemes. Dr. Gibbons is our regions and local enterprise divisional manager.

I thank the Deputy for his comments on the Open Doors Initiative. We are delighted to join the Open Doors Initiative. Diversity in all its forms will be increasingly important for us as an organisation, especially, as the Deputy mentioned, in the signalling effect we can have to clients. It is important that we support these significant initiatives.

On the take-up relating to the Ukraine enterprise crisis scheme, it is still early. We developed the shape of this scheme in August, subject to the appropriate approval, so we have been having conversations with clients through September and October. We were not starting from scratch with last week's announcement; we are well under way in our conversations with clients. That said, there are a small number of applications in because it is support that is retrospective to companies' performance in 2022. We anticipate that companies are to some extent waiting to have a final handle on where that performance will land. As Mr. Leahy mentioned earlier, there are qualifying criteria in the doubling of energy and of 15% EBITDA. As a result, there will be a factor of waiting to see what the eligibility is. On Deputy O'Reilly's comments earlier, what we are doing is trying to make sure the scheme is as easily administrated as it can be and that once we have applications at hand we can process them as quickly as possible. Internationally traded manufacturing companies are the ones that are eligible. Manufacturing that is non-exporting will also qualify so that is an important distinction. Those are the eligibility criteria we have set for the scheme.

I will address the question on startups before I hand over to Dr. Gibbons. It is a major issue for us that we want to see more Irish companies become growing global leaders. If I have one ambition that is core to the things I come back to in my role as chief executive of Enterprise Ireland, it is that in the next ten years we will see more Irish companies become leading global companies. We hope that they will stay Irish, that the headquarters of those operations will increasingly be here and that they will join the ranks of public companies globally, or that they will stay private and grow globally. That is significant and important in the context of the current discourse on FDI and indigenous enterprise. This should not be a contention between FDI and indigenous enterprise. It has served and continues to serve the nation very well. It would do a great disservice to the FDI sector to trade one off against the other. We have room for both to continue to grow together, but I am ambitious for where we can take companies and in that regard we have various programmes that are specifically targeted at keeping companies Irish, including leadership and management programmes. We are expanding our options in the networks of funders that can come in and provide that scaling capital, and we are taking various other measures.

I am conscious that we may not have time to-----