Tony McCormack (Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I want to come back to what was said earlier. The Leas-Chathaoirleach spoke about déjà vu and Mr. McDonnell spoke about doing research and having all the answers but not doing anything with them. This is where we come into play. We must make sure the Government starts listening. We speak about the minimum wage as being the biggest problem we have at present and this is because of the rise over the past four years, with possibly another rise in the budget next week. The bottom line is we need the FDI companies. I know we want to get away from a reliance on FDI and encourage indigenous businesses to scale up, get bigger and be our stars but we are where we are at present, unfortunately, and we have to look after FDI. We cannot have a situation where we fall off a cliff and everybody is in recession and the country goes back years.

We have to look after them. The Government must sit up and listen and make sure that happens. Other countries are becoming more competitive. Years ago we had advantages like an educated workforce but other countries in Europe and further afield now also have an educated workforce. Other countries can speak English now, perhaps not as good as us but they can. We are now bringing in talent from European countries where English is the second language. Our location as the first country on the way to Europe does not come into play any more. All of the benefits we had - there were probably about ten of them - are no longer unique to us. They can also be obtained from other countries. We need to sit up, look after this and listen to the business people, whether it is ISME for small and medium enterprises, IBEC or whatever other business organisation.

In response to Ms Finn, while it is not an enterprise centre, I was the chairperson of the Offaly Innovation and Design Centre. We have an innovation centre there that looks after about 20 to 25 different businesses. Some of them are new and others are not so new. It is similar to an enterprise centre. I feel her pain. We went through the same situation. We currently have no manager in the innovation centre because we have no income from any of the Departments. We are lucky that we have a local enterprise office and some of its staff are standing in to run the centre. I feel Ms Finn's pain and understand where she is coming from in that regard, but it is up to us as members of the Government to put her case to the right Department to make sure that changes.

Ms Finn mentioned that many centres lack innovation management expertise and leadership capacity. How does she propose these gaps be filled? Should it come from increased Government funding, which we already mentioned, or private sector partnerships for alternative models?