Enterprise Support Services Dail Éireann — 2026-01-13 ============================================================ Alan Dillon (FG), Mayo I thank the Deputy for his question and interest in this area. We know how important it is. Recently, the Minister, Deputy Burke, launched the start-up Ireland programme, along with the seed and venture capital scheme. These two pillars are critical to the strategy to make Ireland one of the best places in Europe to start and scale a business. We have allocated over €28 million to start-up Ireland in 2026 to strengthen the start-up ecosystem. The seed and venture capital scheme has gone from strength to strength. The most recent review shows that we are making huge headway with regard to the number of additional jobs that have been created - over 4,300 since it was established in 1994. The review of the scheme from 2013 to 2022 provided up to €2.5 billion in gross value added. There are significant gains in research and development and valuations. Many Irish companies have scaled onto the international and global markets as a result. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-13/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-13