Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael)

It is critical that we support our small businesses before we kill them off with regulation. For example, people running private crèches are so regulated it is unbelievable. They are visited every month and it costs them a great deal to stay in business. The interesting point is that entities such as the rat-infested health centre in Oranmore, an example I cite again this week, do not face half the amount of regulation when it is an arm of the State regulating itself. These are double standards.

Another area with which small and medium-sized enterprises urgently need help is venture capital to match the employers' investment in the business and to help them afford to pay wages in the early days until they come to make a profit. It is worrying that there is no bank in this country which will back people's ideas. The enterprise boards spoke to me about the worrying prospect of small business owners going to the bank, for example, to pay ten weekly wage packets. It places a heavy toll on the man or woman investing his or her money and time in the early days. One must remember that this person is the economic generator who has the potential to do the economy a great service. He or she needs to be supported with a matched venture capital input and there are models available whereby the Government can insure against this risk which I recommend should be explored in the short term.

As other Senators have said, we need to find creative ways to stimulate entrepreneurship. We need to breed an ethos that employers are now competing globally, not just locally, with the globe as the new marketplace. This means we need to embrace new modern technologies and, in this regard, an audit of small businesses is needed to see who needs training and upskilling to help businesses compete in the marketplace.

As my colleague, Senator Donohoe, said, there are 600,000 people in this country with qualifications of junior certificate or lower and 10% with no qualifications at all. Enterprise Ireland finds that urban-based businesses experience more organic growth whereas rural-based businesses still relying on more traditional ways of doing business which are no longer adequate to compete.

We also need to invest in infrastructure. We in Galway, for example, still have the poorest road network in Ireland and our railway is still coming, but the one major area in which the Government should make major strides in a hurry is broadband. Not only is broadband not broadly available, its speed and the bandwidth is inadequate and businesses are encountering significant costs by having to use satellite broadband. A town such as Tuam, which is quite large, still does not have broadband available.

We also need to view second level schools as hotbeds in which to stimulate entrepreneurship. We invest a good deal of money in research and development at third level, but none of us knows the outcome of that. What are we getting out of that?

Coming from the education field, I make this recommendation. The Minister should look at finding unique ways to invest in entrepreneurship and research and development at second level while all those children are still at school. One still has use of compulsory attendance until the age of 16. Although I have not done research on this, I would bet that of the people who drop out at second level, more try their hand at business than in any other area and this is a unique area which has not been tapped. In private business I work with thousands of students from throughout the country and 50% of students in any of my classes will eventually go into business of some form. That is a vast untapped market.

I hope my presentation has been in some way useful and that there is some exchange which may be worthwhile and which the Government would take on.