Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 8 October 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment
Competitiveness and the Cost of Doing Business in Ireland: Discussion (Resumed)
2:00 am
Mr. Aebhric McGibney:
It goes back to Deputy Hayes' point about protecting jobs. In a sense, I disagree, because companies go bust and then new ones start. There is a stock and flow, which is an awful term when we are talking about unemployment, but people move into unemployment and then they become employed again, or people move from home duties straight into employment. The female participation rate is exceptionally high now and above EU norms. We want a dynamism in our businesses. When we argue about enterprise supports, and we talked about risk earlier, that is what we want to see. The answer is yes but no, in terms of protecting jobs. People want the opportunity, if they are looking for work, to get a job. In terms of the dynamics, we are looking at the stock and flow of people moving into and out of employment. For us, it is largely service based. We have the large firms that are maintaining and growing their position in pharmaceuticals and professional services, and then the SMEs are the ones we look to for their scaling and growing. We provide services through the Enterprise Europe Network to help them export, for example. I do not have the maths on this because they are not broken down at a firm level, but we see dynamism, if you like, and that is my sense check in terms of what is happening within firms. In particular, our arguments here and a lot of our arguments about the budget in terms of indigenous versus multinational firms are about trying to help more indigenous firms to grow and scale.
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