Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

To follow that up, and I do not want to paraphrase Professor Coffey, but would it be fair to say that direct funding might be more efficient for SMEs because, for whatever reason, be it bureaucracy or the labyrinthine nature of some of these tax reliefs, the FDI companies find it easier to access them. I believe Professor Coffey was saying in that session that, in real terms, this relief is being outpaced by changes in the US with its research and development code, in any event, and that it is not necessarily a good use of funds. We talk about productivity in SMEs at this committee all the time but if we had more direct funding, do the witnesses believe that it would be more efficient, not just in having the SMEs access this funding, but in respect of increasing productivity, or any other metric one would choose to use?