David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome all the witnesses and thank them for their presentation. Inviting representatives of these organisations to appear before us on a regular basis should be a standing item on our agenda. It is something we need to do because we are talking to entrepreneurs, innovators and risk takers. Mr. Jennings mentioned risk in his presentation. We must recognise that their members do take risks all the time. Hopefully, they pay off and the businesses are successful. Mr. Fee mentioned the perfect storm coming at us. This is what we are in at the moment. Things are buffeting various businesses and sectors from all sides. We must listen and take note of that and see what we can do to assist.

We discussed the issue of energy, which is the big one. Mr. Jennings recognised the illegal Russian war against Ukraine as the main reason for this. Last night, we saw the danger of an escalation of this with the missile attack on Poland, which really frightens me. It is bad enough as it is but if it escalates beyond that, we could really be in a black place. Hopefully, that will not happen and we might see peace break out at some stage.

Leo Clancy appeared before the committee last week. I raised with him the issue of small and medium Irish businesses who scale up to a certain level, cannot go further and are typically taken over by multinationals or other companies. Mr. Clancy said he was very conscious of the need to support such businesses and was working actively to do that. This committee needs to ensure that this does happen because I recognise the issue raised by Mr. McGrane as being hugely important. This is an aside from the main issue we are talking about today.

Mr. McGrane also said the key employee engagement programme, KEEP, scheme is not fit for purpose. I have an interest in that so could he provide some more information? If he cannot do so now, perhaps he could send us a submission on it because that is something we need to follow up on.