John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

225. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the number of companies in County Waterford that have availed of research and development funding over the past five years. [46158/15]

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Enterprise Ireland’s mission is to partner with entrepreneurs, Irish businesses, and the research and investment communities to develop Ireland’s international trade, innovation, leadership, and competitiveness with the ultimate objective of job creation. A key element of Enterprise Ireland’s strategy is to develop innovative companies through supporting research and development at the company level. Enterprise Ireland has a number of financial supports to encourage companies to focus on research and development activities both within their companies and by collaborating with other companies and the third level research institutes.

24 companies in Waterford have been paid by Enterprise Ireland for research and development activities between 2010 and the present time (15 December 2015). These research and development supports include the RandD Fund, the RTI Fund, RandD Stimulation Grants, Technical Feasibility studies and RandD equity packages. Some companies received more than one payment in a given year, and some companies received multiple payments over different years. Table 1, column 1 below shows the breakdown by year of the 65 payment transactions to these 24 companies. Column 2 shows the breakdown of the 24 companies approved. Column 3 shows the breakdown by company by year. Some companies have been approved in different years and therefore the total of 32 is higher than the total number of companies approved (24). Column 4 shows the amount paid per year to these companies.

It should be noted that in addition to these 24 companies, 11 companies were paid Innovative HPSU funding towards the development of their business plan over this period. Many of these business plans would include research and development activities among the other business development activities but are not included in these figures.

IDA Ireland's Research and Development grant payments to companies in Co. Waterford over the past 5 years are set out in table 2.

Table 1: Enterprise Ireland breakdown of payments to the 24 companies between 2010 and 2015.

Table 2: IDA Ireland RandD grants Waterford 2010-2014