Dara Murphy (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Like my colleagues, I welcome the opportunity to speak about the Bill. Having listened to the debate for most of the day, I have noted it is not particularly contentious, although Members have different views, of course. I had the pleasure of serving on the Cork City Enterprise Board for five years. These years were some of the most difficult for business that the country has ever experienced. I was struck by the remarkable determination, enthusiasm, innovation and single-mindedness of people who set up their own businesses. I noted a good link between Enterprise Ireland and Cork City Enterprise Board, but it is better that there be a seamless link between them. Obviously, the enterprise boards were set up to deal with smaller businesses, but the ambition for most businesses is to grow. Many businesses that start up, particularly in the areas of technology, science or medical devices, are better to go directly to enterprise boards.

I agree with previous speakers on local authorities to a certain extent but believe it is important that the enterprise boards have a completely independent and separate identity within them. One of my criticisms of all State bodies, particularly local authorities, concerns the degree to which staff tend to be moved within departments. The expertise people such as David, Olive and Adrian developed in Cork was developed over time as they came to know different people, businesses and types of businesses. I caution local authorities in this regard because the experience is different from that of moving between the various directorships.

Europeans are extremely risk-averse. The Irish are among the most risk-averse in the world, despite the fact that two thirds of us are working in small businesses. In countries such as China and the United States a significantly higher proportion of the population aspire to be self-employed.

We must look at the reasons for that mindset in Ireland, and an obvious one is the issue of reward. In recent years, mainly because of the high taxation rates in our country, the rewards that people can gain by being self-employed and working for 80 or 90 hours a week have diminished. That must be addressed. We must also get over our culture in Ireland in terms of how we treat people who fail. We need to adopt a more American attitude to business failure. In the US, it is widely believed that somebody who has failed is far less likely to fail again because he or she has learned from the experience of failure. That is particularly important now because we have large numbers of people who, through no fault of their own, have had to close their businesses. They now have poor credit ratings and so forth but they have the work ethic, the ingenuity and the determination to establish businesses and to employ people. There are 200,000 small businesses in this country and if every one of them was to hire one person we would reduce by half the number of people who are unemployed.

I welcome this Bill, which fulfils a commitment in the programme for Government. Greater efficiencies will be achieved by reducing the number of enterprise boards around the country and linking them in with local authorities. Cork city is twinned with Shanghai, a city with a population of 20 million. Representatives of the Shanghai enterprise board visited Cork and were very surprised - great as Cork is - that the county has several enterprise boards compared to the single board in their city. A commitment to greater efficiencies has been delivered but, more important, with the great work of Enterprise Ireland and the IDA, our top two semi-State organisations, we will continue to see our unemployment rates steadily drop.

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