Mr. Neil McDonnell:

It is hugely important. I am inverting the problem in that I am saying it is not one for which we can find a solution. Our people are trying to solve it day and night informally. This is a problem for the committee members, as legislators, to fix. If we exclude sole traders, the large companies and the FDI sector, there are 135,000 businesses in the country that are not getting the same supports. IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland are problem solvers and the State is lavishing resources on them to solve problems for a particular demographic. It is a demographic that is only about 3,000 companies deep. We are asking what is being done for the other 135,000 companies. I am not trying to give the Deputy a hard time. I am saying, with respect, that our people are the bedrock of the economy. Like certain beers, they reach the parts of the country other businesses do not reach. They are everywhere. People down the country who are not working for the State as a teacher or public servant locally or are not working on a farm are either unemployed or working for an SME. It is that simple.

However, we do not see the value of the sector being recognised. We need a Whitaker report 2.0. I will not say FDI has taken us as far as it can go but we are saying we can now identify the limitations of that model. It started in 1958 as a move to reduce protectionist barriers and bring in FDI. We brought in a little pet monkey and now we have a gorilla in the cage that is, in effect, of equivalent size to the entire domestic Irish economy. Yet, the SMEs do not have anywhere to call home. I appreciate that under the White Paper on enterprise, the local enterprise offices, LEOs, will look after businesses with up to 50 staff, but there are specific issues to address. For example, the brilliant point has been made that the Germans have a much more explicit integration between their academic institutions and business. They have a much greater appreciation of vocational rather than academic education. That was part of the difficulty I referred to earlier, in discussion with Stephen Farry. We are great at churning people out of the universities with letters after their name but not so great at continuing adult education and vocational education. The Germans, Italians and Austrians leave us in the shade when it comes to vocational education.

We would like to see people coming out of the likes of ATU, for example, with vocational training. We have an absolutely massive marine industry in Killybegs, for instance, but we are not training people for it. We had the Irish Maritime and Energy Research Cluster, IMERC, in Cork but, for whatever mad reason, it was discontinued. That initiative involved a great marrying of technology between University College Cork, UCC, Cork Institute of Technology and the Naval Service. It is gone now. Yet, we are saying our future energy demands will be met by wind-based generation that will be floating offshore. That is the sort of marine-based technology that ATU should be engaging on with engineering firms, boat-building firms, welding people and sheet metal people. They are not necessarily sexy professions and they probably will not get a Minister down cutting a ribbon but they are absolutely essential to the direction in which the economy needs to go.