Mr. Neil McDonnell:

Let us talk about the entities that are there at the minute. There is IDA Ireland, which has very much an activist mandate, Enterprise Ireland, which is effectively one of the largest venture capital equity partners in the world, and InterTradeIreland, which has a particular mandate that straddles the Border. What we have looked for is another agency. We have not been prescriptive about that because it gets emotional depending on what politician you are talking to and whether or not he or she is in government. We are not prescriptive as to how that would work. We are also not suggesting that that entity needs to look like Enterprise Ireland or saying, "Your business is a winner. We will take an equity position to that. Here is €50,000, and we want it to do X, Y and Z with that." It does not even have to go that far. If, however, you have something that looks like InterTradeIreland, that is an advisory and an educational body and gives access to funding. For example, one of the issues we see with the White Paper proposal on the LEOs is that there are big local authorities - for example, in Dublin and Cork - with lots of resources, and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, Fingal and South Dublin county councils have very active LEO networks, but then down the country there are LEOs run by one or two people and they do not have the bandwidth, the financial resources or the qualifications to look after this stuff. Let us say you take a cross-Border entity like Enterprise Ireland and, without necessarily taking the activist position Enterprise Ireland takes, you ask questions like "Do you want to export?" and "Do you want to expand?". A particular area Ireland is very bad in is intergenerational succession, that is, "Are you exiting your business?". We provide that sort of stuff on an ad hocbasis through mentoring, and we have an excellent mentor network, but that is not happening on a policy or State scale. "Do you want to exit your business?" "Do you want to acquire a business?" "Have you an interest in expanding by acquisition?" We have always acknowledged the shortcomings in our member base in manager qualification training and education. We see it coming out in, for example, appearances before the Workplace Relations Commission, prosecutions by the HSA, enforcement visits around visas and so on. We know there are people getting it wrong because they lack this basic business in education. We have suggested we should spend some of the massive €1 billion-plus surplus in the national training fund on doing what we call the blue cert. A wider education mandate could be taken in something like InterTradeIreland. For example, one of the particular problems in Northern Ireland is the extent to which the state and semi-state sector is disproportionately represented in the numbers. There are a large number of people who, in the event of UK withdrawal, would probably need to be retrained or repurposed for working somewhere in the commercial or the for-profit economy. That is the sort of thing that could be looked at.