Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 25 June 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment

General Scheme of the Industrial Development (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2025: Discussion

2:00 am

Mr. John Hughes:

What I can refer to very specifically is that we have recently been working with the IDA in terms of the capacity for digitalisation grants. We were looking to perhaps have arrangements where we would put at its disposal up to €10 million for companies in the digitalisation space. However, it would be a fraction of that - in the tens or perhaps low hundreds of thousand - that goes to consultancy. Some 90% of the grants would be on implementation of the findings from the consultancy, whether it is fixed asset acquisition, technology acquisition or new process development. The actual consultancy proportion would be in the low single-digit percentage of the overall package that, hopefully, the consultancy would leverage in terms of support and investment by the company itself in the area. We would expect something similar to obtain with regard to sustainability, namely, the substantial grants would be company investment supported by maybe a fixed asset or a technology acquisition grant, but the consultancy that identified the particular journey that needed to be undertaken by the company would be of a modest sum.

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