Ceisteanna ó na Comhaltaí Eile - Other Members’ Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-07-15 ============================================================ Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central I appreciate the point. This is a pro-enterprise Government. That matters. I believe in nurturing and supporting companies and people who start their own businesses. Those people take great risks. In many instances, for the first ten years of a new company, they have to work 24-7. An issue we discuss with Enterprise Ireland is how to enable those companies to have capital to scale up. Part of our European Union Presidency programme is around competitiveness and giving a better break to SMEs in particular and giving them greater access to capital. Supporting the self-employed will continue to be a commitment of Government. It is an issue we keep under constant review. There is a cost-of-doing-business forum which comes under the remit of the Minister for Enterprise, Trade, and Employment and which is looking at what we can do to reduce costs, clarify and simplify regulation for SMEs in particular, which would go a long to helping them, and enhance the research and development tax credit in terms of making it available to and accessible by SMEs. --- 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/2026-07-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:08+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-15