Speech by Tánaiste Simon Harris at the Irish Investor Awards 2026

Check against delivery.

Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have to say that the last time I was in the Mansion House for an event, I was also in black tie, I was addressing an awards ceremony and Colette was also MC. So you’ll have to forgive me that I’m having a bit of déjà vu.

It’s also the second night in a row I’ve been in black tie so I feel I’ve been dipping into James Bond’s wardrobe rather than my usual attire, which is making me a bit sad I missed the champagne reception, which really completes the outfit.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed it…

First, a big thank you to Forvis Mazars for the invitation. Thank you to your Managing Partner, Tom O’Brien and Corporate Finance Partner, John Bowe.

Thank you for keeping this event on the calendar year after year. It has earned its place there without doubt.

I want to start with a confession. The first draft of this speech listed nine government schemes by name in the first three pages.

I struck most of them out. You can read about them on gov dot ie.

You did not come here for a recitation. So let me try to do something more useful with the ten minutes I have.

I want to tell you what I actually think about where Ireland is.

And where it has to go next.

Where we are

The Irish economy that walks into 2026 is not the one that walked out of 2008. It is not even the one that walked out of 2019.

Employment is at 2.83 million. That is a record.

Unemployment has been below five per cent for four straight years.

Economists call that full employment, and the rest of us call it a country that works.

Modified Domestic Demand grew by 4.9 per cent last year.

The exchequer is in surplus.

The sovereign balance sheet is strong by any honest international comparison. That is worth saying out loud.

I do not say it to take a victory lap for the Government.

I say it because the conversation about Ireland still carries traces of an older script.

That older script casts us as perpetually fragile, one external shock away from disaster.

That script is out of date.

It is worth pausing now and then to notice that.

It is also worth being honest about why we got here.

Some of it is luck, in the form of geography, demographics, and the English language.

A lot of it is the work of people in this room and rooms like it.

Founders, investors, and the advisers who put the deals together.

Some of it is policy choices made deliberately over twenty-five years, often against the prevailing fashion, often by governments of different colours.

We tend not to give ourselves credit for institutional continuity in this country, and we should.

What has changed underneath us

The world the Irish economy now operates in is not the world it grew up in.

Brexit.

The pandemic.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The return of tariffs as a serious instrument of US trade policy.

And now a war in the Persian Gulf, with the energy supply consequences that come with it.

The IMF has cut its global growth forecasts twice this year.

The old idea that economics and geopolitics were separate disciplines is over. They are now the same conversation.

For a small, open, energy-importing economy, that is not a comfortable place to be.

Volatility is no longer the exception; it is the operating environment.

The question is not whether we can insulate ourselves from it. We cannot.

The question is whether the structures we built for one era will carry us through the next.

On that, I want to be direct. In some areas they will. In some they will not.

The bit that is not working

Here is the bit that is not working.

Ireland is very good at the first kilometre of a company's life.

We are increasingly weak at the tenth.

We have a serious startup ecosystem. Enterprise Ireland backed 187 new companies last year.

The Local Enterprise Offices, the New Frontiers programme, the Pre-Seed Start Fund - the early-stage scaffolding is there, and it works.

The scaling stage is where we lose them.

A study commissioned by my department put a number on it.

The gap in available capital for Irish companies at Series A and beyond is between €860 million and €1.3 billion over the next three to five years.

That is the gap at the rounds where a good Irish company becomes a serious international one.

That is not a rounding error. That is the difference between a company that headquarters in Dublin and one that headquarters in London or New York.

It is the difference between a founder who builds wealth here and one who builds it elsewhere.

It is the difference between jobs and tax base that compound in this country for thirty years and jobs and tax base that compound somewhere else.

The reasons are not mysterious. Irish equity funds are too small.

The pool of domestic institutional capital allocated to venture and growth equity is too shallow.

Our pension system, unlike Sweden's or the Netherlands', has not historically been a serious source of patient capital for our own economy.

And the European market beyond our borders, which ought to be the natural next pool of funding, remains fragmented.

A Dublin scaleup chasing a Series B feels further from Frankfurt than from California.

This is not a problem the State can solve on its own with a chequebook.

It is structural, and it requires structural answers.

What we are going to do about it

So here is what we are going to do about it.

First, at European level.

The Commission will bring forward its Growth Fund Reform package in September, as part of the wider Savings and Investments Union.

The Kukies – Noyer [Kookies - Nwa-yay] report has set out a serious agenda.

That agenda covers making European listings work, mobilising pension capital, and building public co-investment vehicles that crowd private capital in rather than crowd it out.

Ireland will not be a passive recipient of these proposals.

We hold the Council Presidency in the second half of next year, and we intend to use it.

The Savings and Investments Union, and the venture and growth capital reforms within it, will be a priority of our Presidency. That is a commitment, not an aspiration.

And as part of this, I will establish a Savings and Investment Account as part of the upcoming Budget – finally addressing the fact that while Irish people are among the best savers in Europe but nonetheless we have one of the lowest levels of retail investment.

Staying at home, and second on the list, the Seed and Venture Capital Scheme has had €250 million committed to it for the period to 2029.

That is the largest allocation in the scheme's thirty-year history.

Over those three decades, funds backed by the scheme have invested €1.4 billion in more than six hundred Irish companies.

Independent review estimates those companies generated €2 billion in Gross Value Added and 4,300 jobs. That is a programme that has earned its place.

But seed is not the issue. As I said, scaling is the issue.

My Department is now developing a set of measures aimed specifically at the scaling-finance gap.

These measures are designed to mobilise Irish institutional capital, including pension capital, into Irish growth equity.

This is a priority action of the Action Plan on Competitiveness and Productivity.

It is not a small undertaking, and I will not pretend the design questions are easy.

The cost of not doing it is the cost we are already paying. Companies sold too early, founders relocated too soon.

We will have more to say on this in the coming months.

Third, Startup Ireland.

We are establishing it this year with €28 million in capital.

It will consolidate a scattered set of supports into a single front door. The OECD recommended it, founders have been asking for it, and we are doing it.

The target is a thousand new startups over five years.

A word to the room

Let me close on this.

Ministerial speeches at events like this tend to follow a particular form.

The minister thanks the host, lists the schemes, congratulates the nominees, and sits down.

I have tried to do something slightly different tonight. The moment deserves it.

The Irish investment community is part of the answer to the structural question I have just described.

That includes venture, growth, private equity, the funds, the advisers, and the corporate finance teams.

The scaling gap will not close because government wills it to close.

It will close because the capital, the deals, and the expertise in this room expands to fill it.

Government's job is to make that expansion easier, more profitable, and less encumbered than it currently is. That is the work my department is doing.

I make one ask of you in return. When you see a policy choice that would help, tell us.

Tell us specifically. The areas I have in mind are pension allocation, fund structures, the tax treatment of growth equity, and the friction of operating across European borders.

The single most useful thing the investment community can do for the next phase of Irish economic policy is to stop being polite about what is broken.

Congratulations to tonight's nominees and finalists. You are here because you are good at this.

Ireland is, on the evidence, getting better at it. We intend to keep going.

Enjoy the rest of the evening.

ENDS

ENDS