Mr. Declan Hughes:

I thank the Deputy for those comments. Certainly all those issues are ones we are currently considering. In the context of the national economic plan, the Tánaiste and the Government have commenced the development of that process. As we speak, stakeholder consultation sessions are taking place this morning, for which more than 200 stakeholders have registered to engage virtually. That is looking afresh right across the economy, as the Deputy said, to build for the medium and longer term.

One particular element that is an input into that process is the SME task force which the Tánaiste established about three weeks ago. It has already had two plenary meetings and formed a series of four subgroups. They are meeting on the key areas of entrepreneurship; areas of productivity and competitiveness, of which climate change is obviously a part; internationalisation; and collaboration and networks, bringing in the regional dimension. That is on the back of an OECD report we commissioned and received at the end of last year, which involved a fundamental examination of our supports for SMEs and entrepreneurship in the country. The report identified a number of key areas we need to focus on, including climate and the green agenda but also the levels of and adoption of digitalisation, which it indicated were behind where they should be for our SME base. In multinationals we have our productivity levels, our start-up levels and our rates of internationalisation. The report set clear targets for stepping up all of those in terms of, for example, a doubling of the number of start-ups, which brings me back to that point regarding not only the high-potential start-ups, HPSUs, but start-ups in all parts of the economy. The Deputy will recall that during the recession we went from having 14,000 start-ups a year to 18,000 or 19,000. They were across the board, with HPSUs accounting for 150 a year.

As to how we support entrepreneurship in all parts of the economy, that is also linked to the regional agenda. As the Deputy mentioned, as part of the regional action plans, we have €100 million for regional enterprise development funds. That is funding hubs and enterprise centres around the country. There is one now in every county which was a target under the Action Plan for Jobs. We also launched a €15 million Border enterprise development fund to help Border countries to respond to Brexit. Entrepreneurship is a key part of that in addition to responding to advanced manufacturing, digitalisation-----