Mr. John Murphy:

I thank Mr. Philip Kelly. Deputy Lawlor asked what we have been trying to do to reduce our definition of an SME for procurement purposes from 250 employees. That 250 is an EU-wide definition. It does not mean that one has to have 250 employees. In our national policies we focus on much smaller firms across a range of programmes, for example, Enterprise Ireland operates with smaller firms. We generally use a figure of 50 as a defining point.