Mr. Shane Conneely:

There does seem to be a sort of a pattern. We see this throughout the report as well. Often, the supports available are so complicated that they are not practical and not useful to small businesses. Part of my commentary in our submission is that much of this is a feature and not a bug of these processes. Very often with schemes like the key employee engagement programme, KEEP, to which we suggest amendments in every budget, it is accepted that there will be amendments but these are so slight that it is still not an effective scheme in the next cycle. These things are frequently put in place to allow it to be said that a support is in place, however impossible it might be to get the benefit from it. This is something the report itself highlights, but it is repeated across programmes such as TBESS. These things are done but they are not done so they can be useful. Within State bodies, there is often a great deal of concern about how effective these measures could be, because if they are too effective they will cost the Exchequer and therefore in their creation these schemes are constructed so that they are difficult to use. We need to move beyond this situation.

Our member businesses are doing tremendously well across the country. Over the last several years when we have been contacted from places like Galway, Louth or south-west Dublin businesses have told us they have been having difficulties. Often, they are so busy that they cannot take the benefits that are on offer. The refrain we hear in response to this situation and complaints about it is that these businesses must not have needed these supports if they did not have the time to apply for them. It could frequently be the case, however, that we would find dozens of hours going into something that may or may not pay back that effort. One of the elements in this context is that there is a huge risk factor. People can put their time into submitting these applications without necessarily knowing if the pay-off will come. One of the things we did like about recommendation 9.7 concerned the advanced assurance mechanism being proposed for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment where businesses could engage with a professional who could give them a sense of whether something would be worth doing. This approach would also be very useful in the research and development context. A small business starting off on this track will find it a huge challenge to get into and understand how this research and development credit system can work. Having supports in place to help to guide applicants through this process, therefore, will be very important to make it effective.