James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

One can discern the merger of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and the Department of Finance in the Minister of State's answer in the sense that it dealt primarily with the tax credits that are available. It is an interesting avenue to go down but I am more interested in the public expenditure side. The research and development tax credits are very important, as is the knowledge box and I was pleased to pass amendments earlier in the year in this area. However, they are only one piece of the puzzle and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has the responsibility and opportunity to increase the funding to research and development programmes.

I made a submission to the capital plan suggesting that the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, engage with the EU so that Ireland could draw down Juncker funding, where multiple billions are available for infrastructure in the Europe Union's Horizon 2020 programme and other projects. The successor programmes, which are now coming on stream, also have significant amounts of capital available and they would be delighted to engage with Ireland to fund its needs. There are additional opportunities such as CERN, in which we could invest significantly to reap significant rewards, and the European Space Agency, which I visited with the Minister of State at the Department of Education and Skills, Deputy Halligan, and where there are huge commercial opportunities. The multiplier effect comes into play and every euro invested yields €7 or €8 for the Exchequer in financial opportunities.

As regards investment in education infrastructure, the programme for research in third level institutions, PRTLI, was a fantastic scheme, founded by Fianna Fáil but continued under the last Government. However, it has now ground to a halt and there is an urgent need to support and fund a successor programme. However, while phase 5 should be coming out now, it has not emerged. There is also a need for a balanced portfolio, not only to fund applied and commercial research but to fund the pipeline too - the basic, frontier-level research which creates the opportunities and ideas for commercial opportunities. They deal with the bread and butter elements, namely, the buildings, laboratories and libraries.

On the tax side, there was a JobsPlus scheme where small business got a cash return for taking on employees but an R&DPlus scheme was mentioned by the Small Firms Association, SFA, and this could be very useful in encouraging innovation in the SME sector.

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