Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)

I thank Deputy McAuliffe and I absolutely agree with him. We are doing that through our new semiconductor strategy, which clearly calls out the role Enterprise Ireland will have in advice and financing access to these projects.

One thing I will say is one of the big projects we have had is from Analog Devices which has approximately a €630 million investment through the projects of common European interest. I was looking at one of these semiconductor companies quite recently, which had 814 SMEs on its books that it was working on. This was a large-scale company with services from Banagher to Longford. It was incredible to see so many SMEs linked in. That is why, as part of the review of the national development plan, it will be critical to get more support into our enterprise development agencies to enable companies to access these incredible projects. We know renewables and semiconductors are areas the European Union is focusing on and since the competitive compass that has come on foot of the Draghi report, we will see many areas of opportunity on behalf of the Irish Government. We are fighting very hard for additional funding in this area through the NDP envelope which will be negotiated in the coming weeks.

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