Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)

To clarify about Enterprise Ireland, it is not money that is being taken away from Enterprise Ireland. It is actually that Enterprise Ireland generated more money than expected from its investments, so it is a success story. Each year Enterprise Ireland gives back money to the State. This is called own resource income and it is essentially money that it invests in companies. When it decides to realise that investment or move or leave its shareholding in it, money comes back into the Exchequer, and that has been greater than originally planned. We have €15 million additional capacity to reallocate around the Department. That is what we are looking for permission with. Notwithstanding that, we have to ensure that Enterprise Ireland spends its allocation on the other side, which is critical. Directly on the Cathaoirleach's point, we are now launching our consultation programme for our new start up Ireland scheme. This will be the State's offering for those early stage incubation ideas that are critical to the success of Ireland being a world leader in start-up enterprises, which we really need to get to the forefront of again. I invite the Cathaoirleach and his colleagues to work with us on that.

My only issue with Station F is that it is a decade old. We have to really look at what are the new innovative ideas, because society is changing so rapidly. Artificial intelligence is changing so much. General purpose technology has revolutionised every single sector. Just like when electrification came here, it goes right through the economy and we need to be able to grasp the opportunity in that. Together, we all need to think about what system we need to reflect our enterprise base and that is going to grow our start ups. It will need to work with the huge base we have with Dogpatch Labs, which does exceptional work, PorterShed and Republic and all those early start up supports to bring them together and working with them to enhance and grow the sector more . Start up Ireland and our new national accelerator programme will be key elements in doing this. We have an exceptional target to have 1,200 new start-up companies going to success and scale over the next five years, through Enterprise Ireland. This will bring us to about 275,000 jobs supported by the agency over the next five years. We want all hands on deck working with members here in the committee and working with the sectors to deliver upon that. Since I came into the Department I have been focusing very heavily on tourism but also on the enterprise sector and our small family businesses. I am also focusing on the new ideas coming through that we need to work, develop and get those companies to scale. It is great to have Jenny Melia as the new chief executive of Enterprise Ireland as she is very committed to that start-up space.