Ms Julie Sinnamon:

Over the past few years, we have done considerable work on female entrepreneurs specifically and on determining the issues affecting them that we need to address. Five issues arose. We find that Ireland's issues prevail internationally. The first is less access to finance and the second is a lower level of risk-taking relative to men. Another is the lack of role models. Females are recognised as being more affected by role models than males. That there are fewer female entrepreneurs reinforces this. There is a lack of technical skills and a relative lack of self-confidence. We have intervened by trying to address each of these issues specifically, firstly by running competitive funds specifically for females. When we ran these funds, a number of the women failed because of the competitive nature of the funds - there is a maximum number of participants allowable - but we then encouraged them to go for general funds. Females who failed to get funding through a female-only fund were able to succeed with a general fund. This broadened access to finance and also did a lot for confidence. To be able to say that failure in the female fund had actually turned to success in the general fund was really very powerful.

We have increased the number of development programmes, some of which are network peer learning by female entrepreneurs working through going for growth. At this stage, we have put hundreds of women through such programmes. A lot of work is being done through networks all around the country in terms of encouraging people. We have launched some of these programmes in the regions, with, for example, Cork Institute of Technology, and in Dublin with DCU Ryan Academy. This is all about building the confidence and the ambition levels of female entrepreneurs to go for growth and certainly that is feeding through. There is much focus on the number of females starting businesses. As big an issue at least is the lack of growth in those businesses going forward so it has been about trying to encourage more role models. We have been sponsoring programmes to put a spotlight on the successful role models. This is very important in terms of encouraging more people into it.

Many of the technical start-ups we have supported are led by females who do not have the technical skills but they have surrounded themselves with a team of people who have such skills. We have taken each of those five areas and we have specific programmes in place on each of them. We are more than happy to go into the detail, line by line, of all of those. I will invite Ms Jean O'Sullivan in at this stage. She is the dynamo who has been doing all the work at regional level and building confidence. She has been working not only with Enterprise Ireland clients, but also with local enterprise offices and clients in every region of the country.