Business Supports
Dail Éireann — 2025-11-13
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Colm Burke (FG), Cork North-Central

Ireland has a significant number of indigenous companies that have successfully scaled €100 million in revenue and turnover and 250 employees, creating essential local employment and economic prosperity across the country, especially in rural areas. Despite the efforts of many, the majority of the current State supports treats such companies as too large to be SMEs and too small to be public limited companies, PLCs. While Revenue currently provides direct equity to start-ups and high-potential start-ups, HPSUs, larger Irish companies lack the opportunity for direct equity investment to support international expansion, especially through mergers and acquisitions. I have already outlined that Denmark and Germany are providing support to companies to expand outside their jurisdictions. The gap slows down the scaling growth of Irish companies outside Ireland despite the success of some notable exceptions. The lack of direct State equity backing invariably means most end up using private equity. The opportunity for Ireland to cover it is lost and foreign ownership is the ultimate outcome.
That is basically where I am coming from on this. These companies want to expand. There is an opportunity for them to expand but they cannot do so. If they get the equity, it is extremely expensive. In order to expand, they end up getting into ownership from abroad.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-11-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:06+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-11-13