Dr. Brian Caulfield:

Could I add a couple of points to that? They also speak to Deputy Bruton's point on exits. It is probably fair to say that, in Ireland, the funding companies get initially is very hard to access because we do not have a particularly active angel capital market, for example. Even though we are talking about companies at a very early stage, this has a significant long-term impact because companies can become gun-shy about raising the capital they need to scale themselves if their initial funding rounds have been difficult and highly dilutive. That may well have an impact on the desire of founders to exit early.

Anything we can do to improve the accessibility of early-stage funding will have an impact in the longer term. It is important to understand that companies typically cannot go to the global capital markets for early-stage funding. They are highly reliant on domestic capital. We certainly should not see all exits as negative because, as Dr. Murphy alluded to, entrepreneurs often become repeat entrepreneurs when they exit. They may become an investor in and mentor to other early-stage companies. We should certainly encourage that. However, we should also try to find mechanisms to support entrepreneurs to realise some of their investment in their businesses, or to take some money off the table, and continue to run and develop their businesses in the future. The capital markets, including Euronext Dublin, have a role to play. As things stand, this is underexploited.

On the Deputy's point regarding the availability of skills and the inability to find staff with skills within Ireland, the KEEP share option scheme has an important role in this regard because the taxation of share options has an impact the ability not only to recruit domestically from large companies but also to recruit people with high-quality talent and skills in short supply to come from abroad to live and work in Ireland.