Mr. Simon McKeever:

I do not want to knock what we are good at. We are very good at helping small- to medium-sized businesses, but you could name the three or four truly global companies that we have which are real champions in the field. There is something going on whereby most of our businesses are small businesses, down in microspace, and they are not getting up into that successful loop of which I spoke. How do you get a company that has one to ten employees into the loop and bring it from ten to 50 employees or more? You need to look at what those companies lack. The first thing a small business needs is customers. Exporting allows a business to find a great many more customers overseas but requires a great deal of resources. To find customers locally, there are many private sector supports. However, is it the Government’s job to find customers for small businesses? I am not sure that is the way to go. For the smaller businesses it is about taking some of the stuff that we do very well in our State support agencies, particularly Enterprise Ireland, and bringing some of that DNA into smaller companies and helping them and potentially infusing that into the system, or a separate entity that looks at owning that space.

In the larger ones, companies have told us that they have been encouraged to sell once they got to a certain scale. Something is wrong in our thinking, nationally, in that regard. Do we believe we are not up to the task of creating global companies?