Mr. David Hegarty:

The issue is acknowledged in the White Paper. The fact that digitalisation is the second of our seven priorities speaks to its importance. Digitalisation is not an end in itself. We see it as very important as a way of boosting the productivity performance of all firms, particularly SMEs. There is a lot of international evidence that the adoption of digital technologies can help in that regard.

Deputy Stanton called out the position in terms of some of the indicators that relate to the digital capacity of SMEs. What we are doing about that is under the EU funded national recovery and resilience plan. Our Department has two programmes under that EU facility. We have one programme in the area of decarbonisation and another in the area of digitalisation. Under that programme, we will invest, mainly through Enterprise Ireland, EI, some €85 million over the period between now and 2025. EI will roll out a range of programmes essentially with the aim of helping SMEs understand their digital capacity and readiness, and then to take action to address those. That would be one of our main interventions in that area.