Mr. Leo Clancy:

I thank the Senator. I will start the responses to her questions, if that is okay. At the very top level, we published our strategy last month, as I said. The headline target under pillar 4 of our strategy is to adopt the Government target of a reduction of 29% to 41% in the enterprise sector by 2030. That is a critical and key target on which we are focused. With every support we offer in this space at present, we are asking questions about the tonnage of carbon that will be reduced as a result of the intervention, whether under the Lean initiative or a result of direct green support. If I go back one step, we have, in line with our strategy launch, created a new sustainability and climate action department. We have staffed it up. That team was active at an early stage last year but we have expanded it significantly. There are three broad elements to that. The first is to ensure we have funding supports available to business. The second is to ensure we are monitoring that target achievement. We have actions under the climate action plan to ensure we are monitoring the carbon output and actively working towards reducing it. The third element, to the point Deputy O'Reilly mentioned, is around ensuring we maximise the opportunities from the green economy because I think they are many. I know the committee will agree that there are considerable opportunities for Irish businesses if we can get the story right locally, and we are doing that. We will see a big dividend in jobs from this space. That is good.

On the Monday before last, I visited Tricel, a company of ours in Killarney. Tricel, along with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, was launching an intervention around oil usage and solar power, among other things. Tricel has done an extensive intervention on its plant. We have seen that across many other companies in our base and I think we will continue to see that. Companies are definitely on that track. There was a question for Mr. McElwee about smaller company supports. Certainly at the mid size, there is a lot of support available from Enterprise Ireland. The key support we offered last year was the climate enterprise action fund, which was a voucher for companies to take the first step. As Senator Garvey alluded to, we saw disappointing take-up of that, at least in the first half of the year although it improved towards the end of the year. COP26 was not irrelevant to the improvement of the trend in that regard. We want to drive that again this year and will do so. We are preparing to launch a further campaign. Awareness is the first step though, necessarily, that will not have targets associated with it because it is a small intervention. As the Senator said, it is about getting the headspace right and getting companies to start thinking about these issues. We see the same thing the Senator sees. SMEs are busy and until climate change is an impending and compelling challenge, they will not focus on it.

We have for a number of years had environmental aid support to help with capital interventions for companies, including GreenStart and GreenPlus, which are effectively Lean projects about how to integrate more green techniques into a business. Those supports are well established so we are not starting from scratch. We are trying to increase the take-up of those. We will see a lot more take-up of those during this year. The more companies I meet around the country the more heartened I am by the level of attention to these issues. We are absolutely heading in the right direction. Conscious of time, I will hand over to Mr. McElwee to talk about the microenterprise element.