Mr. John Murphy:

Yes, I am aware of that. There is a lot of work going on. We have focused, in particular, on certain critical administrative aspects of Horizon 2020 that could act as a barrier to participation in smaller countries like Ireland. Some member states favoured a more complex set of arrangements for funding that would benefit large research institutions at the expense of smaller ones and make funding more difficult. Let us say one tries to put together a consortium comprising a number of institutes. In that case we would be anxious to ensure that the funding arrangements are as straightforward as possible to better facilitate smaller member states, Ireland in particular. There is a lot of work being done. First, we must maximise our potential for funding under the existing programme that has not finished yet. Second, we want to be ready to hit the ground running when Horizon 2020 comes on stream.

I shall respond to the question about state aid modernisation. Aid in the "C" regions is extremely important to several member states, including Ireland. There are two critical issues. First, will aid be available. Second, if so is it only available for new products or enterprises. A significant part of IDA Ireland's work is to retain, build and help existing multinationals to change their product plans or processes and so on in order to stay ahead of the competition. Therefore, it was important to get some modifications to facilitate aid for existing enterprises provided it was for new products or processes. We have achieved significant success in that regard. Where an issue arises IDA Ireland will have to ensure that it can work with people to develop their proposals in a way that meets requirements.

Finally, an entrepreneurship strategy was mentioned. We are developing an entrepreneurship strategy at present.

We know the rate at which new businesses start up is critical to economic recovery. We know, for example, that the bulk of new employment comes in the first five years of the life of an enterprise and that after that it tends to go into more steady state environment unless it happens to be in a rapidly growing sector. The first five years is critical to the creation of employment in the bulk of companies.

We need to increase the rate of start-up and to ensure we have the right mix of policies and measures in place to facilitate that. There is work being done on a national strategy at present. In that context, the EU's proposals on women serving on boards was mentioned and also that the Minister had appointed a group recently. These are two different issues. We were conscious in developing the action plan for jobs 2013 of the need to do more in the area of female entrepreneurship and we included some specific measures in that regard, on which Enterprise Ireland is working. The proposal coming from the EU on quotas for women serving on boards refers to major companies, PLCs. There is division among member states on this. We have had a policy of trying to achieve a 40% quota on State boards, which is quite difficult to implement as I am sure Deputy Calleary will recall from his time as a Minister of State. It has not been easy in recent years to find people generally who want to serve on State boards but it is difficult to find women in particular, especially in the enterprise sector. A number of member states objected to this on subsidiarity grounds, including the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, countries that would normally be regarded as relatively progressive on matters of social policy and so on, but it is interesting that on this particular proposal there was significant opposition.