Ms Julie Sinnamon:

It also involves working right back from the schools. A small team in Enterprise Ireland has been doing work in this regard and there has been a massive amount of support from all the existing female entrepreneurs in the country. They are doing a lot of the coaching and mentoring while continuing to operate their businesses. There are people in venture capital, VC, firms, banks and accountancy offices, that is, there is a whole raft of people who all are supportive of this and who really are opening doors.

One issue is still a lack of funding and more must be done in this regard. I am not necessarily talking about Enterprise Ireland but perhaps there should be more angel funding or getting some of the high net worth individuals and there is the ability to do more to try to address the funding issues. If one looks back over some of the work, I note that in the past two weeks, the 30% Club from the United Kingdom had its launch in Ireland. A lot of the work that club is doing is to get successful female entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom to go into the schools. This must start right back with getting this on to the agenda of children from second level and right through and this is a massive amount of work.

One other point mentioned by the Senator was the attitude to entrepreneurs. Over the past four or five years, there has been quite a move, in that there has been a less negative approach to entrepreneurs. Increasingly, people appreciate the impact in communities. There probably is not the-----