Mr. Simon McKeever:

I thank the Deputy. We are referring to Deputy Bruton's comments earlier. A large amount of the cash the State puts into enterprise goes into the domestic piece and into Enterprise Ireland rather than into the smaller businesses. It is disproportionate in terms of the resources. We are focusing on domestic businesses; we are just not focusing on them all. My sense has always been that there is some really good DNA in Enterprise Ireland. We need to get it down into the smaller businesses.

I was out on my own for four years. I had my own micro consulting business. I describe what we do as an organisation of 14 people. When you are on your own, it is difficult and challenging. The number one issue is how to find a customer. How do we develop a business and create a website and do all that at the same time?

Enterprise Ireland does a great job but we are not as a country looking at the whole spectrum of domestic businesses. We also need to be very careful in that if we develop domestic businesses that are focused solely on the domestic market, they are missing a trick because the domestic market is very small. If we start with a domestic company that is selling locally into what is eventually a local value chain or local supply chain, how do we connect them up into the bigger buyers? One of the problems we have with the bigger buyers is that a larger organisation with a global footprint tends to have global suppliers. Therefore, how do we get a small Irish business into the global value chain? It is extremely difficult because that decision does not reside in Irish enterprise. It tends to reside in the American headquarters or French headquarters or wherever it might be and, therefore, I absolutely believe there is something in the DNA of what Enterprise Ireland does that can be transferred down into the smaller companies. However, smaller companies need a whole different set of skills as well.