Mr. Thomas Hunter McGowan:

We are very supportive of corporation tax and would like to see that happen but it is on hold until after the Scottish referendum on independence. One other issue that comes up often is access to finance and the availability of finance. We will publish a report on that at the end of this month. One of our findings is that SMEs over-rely on overdraft to fund their working capital, up to around 91%, compared with 61% for their European counterparts. That is effectively caused by the lack of other opportunities to get venture capital or equity sharing. We will raise that issue later. We will publish the report in two or three weeks' time. There has always been a great deal of attention given to that area. The supply side is alright. We have serious concerns that companies are not investing in growth finance to upgrade their equipment and their capabilities for future growth but are trying only to deal with the debts that they have on hand. That will become a major issue as we go along. Many have cited it as a difficulty.

We would like to develop all of our programmes and deliver more of what we do because we have recently completed a full strategic review of what we do with all the major strategic partners with whom we deal, as we prepare our corporate plan for 2014-2016. Generally SMEs, sponsoring Departments and all interested agencies have said that we are on the right track and that we are doing the kind of things that they would like us to do. There are a few bits of filtering here and there that we have considered.

One of our biggest programmes is Innova in which we get two companies, one North and one South, to collaborate on a joint project. It has become very difficult for us to support as many projects as we would like, simply because of their size. It is an area that we would like to grow. We have some marvellous examples such as a company in Carlow called T.E. Laboratories, TelLab, collaborating with Williams Industrial Services in Newtownabbey to develop a portable water pollution monitoring device. If successful, this could be very important in the world market, never mind in the Irish market. We would like to see more of that but there are limits to what we can afford in that regard.

We have to remain in the space of being policy-takers. If we expand the boundaries of what we do in the areas we are in that will keep us busy enough, without becoming something completely different.