Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We continue to support businesses to trade and innovate, as well as look at their productivity and competitiveness. I have just launched the new initiative, Future Jobs, which will help companies to look at investing. We need to bring up the competitiveness of our small and medium-sized enterprise sector, SMEs. Sometimes it is masked by a competitive foreign direct investment sector which has high productivity levels. We need to concentrate on our SMEs because they are the backbone of our enterprise base.

We are also encouraging more companies to invest in research and development. That is important and is one of the mitigating measures for Brexit. We are asking companies to diversify their markets, look at their competitiveness and invest in their research and innovation. It has been found that companies which did invest in innovation actually had a greater likelihood of surviving the last crash. Many of them came through because they had invested in new products.

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