John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)

The 35 county and city enterprise boards, CEBs, are the principal deliverers of State support to the micro-enterprise sector in Ireland. They provide support to businesses with ten or fewer employees in the start-up and expansion phases and they promote and develop indigenous micro-enterprise potential and stimulate economic activity and entrepreneurship at local level. As locally based enterprise development agencies, the boards are well positioned to meet the needs of the local economy.

The main focus of the CEBs is on the micro-enterprise sector and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The eligibility criteria under which they operate and the range of financial and non-financial instruments available to their clients have been very effective tools in the development of the micro-enterprise sector in Ireland since the inception of the CEBs and have enabled the CEBs to provide targeted assistance to the micro-enterprise sector, with excellent results. While it is acknowledged that there will be differences in requirements in the areas served by the various CEBs, my Department is satisfied that the current arrangements for eligibility criteria have generally allowed sufficient latitude to individual CEBs to respond to the needs in their own areas. While CEBs are not in a position to allocate direct grant assistance to companies with more than ten employees, they are permitted to provide indirect assistance such as advice, mentoring and a broad range of training programmes, the value of which should not be underestimated.

The budget allocation to the CEBs has increased steadily over the last few years, and the 2009 allocation announced in the recent budget represents a 16% increase in the capital allocation over 2008. This is against a background of savings in other areas of Government activity and is a clear acknowledgement and endorsement of the importance of the boards and of the need that exists for their services, particularly in the current economic climate.

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