Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We should not lose sight of the fact that research and development needs to be at a scale that assists in the competition that firms in this country face from other jurisdictions that are eagerly and aggressively watching what happens here. For instance, most companies start off small. The major international companies operating in this country, like the ones in Kerry, Dundalk and various other places, started off in garden sheds. They had to have research and development. They could not have got off the ground otherwise. They did that research and development well, and they grew because of their reliance on it and by employing it successfully to promote and expand their operations. While it may, from a political point of view, be interesting to tell a community that it is getting too much, it is growing too big, too fat and so forth and it needs to be trimmed down a bit, we do not have to do that. There are already plenty of competitors in the marketplace eyeing them up with a view to ensuring they maximise their attack on our industry – on our friends – in the quickest way possible. We need to examine all aspects of what we are saying and to ensure that the research and development tax credit that is available to companies starting off remains. They cannot expand further unless they have the benefit of something from some quarter, for example, research and development, and some support for it. These companies are getting bigger and it requires much more to engage in the same amount of research and development that they were doing a number of years earlier.