Ms Niamh Bushnell:

That is a great question about the difference between female entrepreneurs here and the United States. The Deputy is correct that there are no supports of that nature for women who have kids and want to be entrepreneurs. What helps as an entrepreneur if one has young kids is that one can choose one's own hours to work, which is great. That helped me because I had my son in 2009 and started my first start-up when he was two years old. I could spend an hour with him in the morning and then go into my home office - the proverbial working out of a basement - work for a few hours, get stuff done and make conference calls before checking on him and returning to the office. Even though somebody else had to mind him - in my case, my husband who also had a flexible arrangement in his profession - it allowed me not to leave him all the time at a young age and not to see him when I was working. The positive side of having young kids and becoming an entrepreneur is that there is no clocking in and clocking out. A person may end up working late hours, or early in the morning or having to be creative about what he or she is doing, but it gives flexibility to choose the hours he or she works and to be deliberate about when he or she works. However, he or she will end up working long weekends and so on. It is not ideal, but the flexibility was massive for me knowing that I did not have to get up every morning and take the subway into the city to a job. Every day was different and I could be there at different times. That was important and added a great value to our family life. I can only comment from personal experience.