Ms Breda O'Sullivan:

The purpose of this is to help companies to develop their plans. We see this consultancy as a way of developing a plan for them. It is almost like an investment plan. The consultant will help them to understand what they need on their site or in their factory so they can then have a full digitalisation project, a full energy efficiency project or a full capital deployment. It is just to make sure they have the expertise they need to put the plan in place. In that case, having someone permanently is not necessarily the right thing. They might have to hire people permanently when they are actually moving to the action phase but this is really just to help them to get there.

We do not know the numbers right now. This is an area that we are really pushing in our strategy to get companies to be involved in again. To underpin their investment in Ireland, they need to work on things like digitalisation and energy efficiency. It is to really make the Irish plant, the Irish factory or the Irish office as efficient as it can be and to keep companies here for as long as we can. That is the purpose. This is not an ongoing support so they will have a consultant working for them forever and a day. It is to put a specific thing together. One thing that will be in the grant agreement with them is the output or what is going to happen with this consultancy. For example, is it a digital plan, is it an energy efficiency plan and what is going to be the output? The payment will be dependent on that as well.