Ms Siobhán Finn:

We have taken time to speak to many of our enterprise managers and CEOs around the country like Ms O’Connell, Mr. O’Meara, Mr. O’Connor, who is on screen, and their counterparts. A number of consistent messages are coming back to us. I submitted a letter to the regions unit in the Department last February setting out very clearly what that feedback was. Simply put, the scheme is incredibly unwieldy. It is not fit for purpose. The application process is tedious and demanding. It demands extreme resource as well as investment in reports to back up applications. The centres themselves are under-resourced with staffing. They do not necessarily have the expertise within their own team to fill out these very unwieldy applications. There is a requirement for match funding. There is some ambiguity about what that match funding should or could look like. We have spoken to a number of organisations outside Ireland which have drawn down similar moneys. There is greater clarity for the mechanisms for match funding and they are far less onerous. In the case of Malta, for example, the development of the Valletta design centre was capital investment with 70% coming from Europe and the balance of the 25% came from the Maltese Government.