Mr. John Murphy:

Yes, there are many other avenues of funding for smaller companies and so on. This funding is assessed. A call for proposals is being assessed at present following on from the research prioritisation exercise. Essentially, that involves two tests, namely, excellence of the scientific quality of the research and the capacity for commercialisation and whether it is linked to the actual needs of industry and so on. This also will be internationally peer-reviewed, which is important for a small country such as Ireland. I suppose the test of this will be over time. My concern is to ensure that we try to get the balance right between what one needs to invest to get jobs tomorrow as opposed to what one might wish to spend to get jobs today. It is a very difficult balance to strike, particularly in the context of the present crisis. However, given the importance of research and development of the Irish economy, it is very important that we try to protect our level of investment in research and development and in particular to increase what we can leverage from the private sector, which we have been doing successfully.

The Deputy asked about entrepreneurship. I should point out the report is about developments during that six-month period. We have put a particular focus upon entrepreneurship for the Irish Presidency. We are anxious, for example, that our informal Council will have a particular focus on entrepreneurship and we will consider the financing of entrepreneurship, of which we have good experience in this country when compared with other countries. Enterprise Ireland, for example, effectively operates as the largest venture capital company in Europe. It takes equity stakes in very small companies and finances them at a very early stage and this is experience that we would like to share. Interestingly, in the context of our co-operation with the United Kingdom, this is an area its authorities have examined and they believe the offering they provide to small companies is not as good as the range of programmes we offer. It is interesting that this is the area in which they would like to gain from co-operation with Ireland. We wish to focus on access to finance and are working with our colleagues in the Department of Finance and with the European Commission to get a strong focus on that around the time of our informal competitiveness Council.