Joe quoted Dylan Collins of Jolt Games about the culture of start-ups and funding in Ireland:
“If Enterprise Ireland was to make 200 or 300 grants available every year at €50,000 a pop for entrepreneurs to build an online product and go to market. For €50,000, you can get three or four guys in a room for three or four months and they will build a product and go to market. If we had 300 of these groups every year, you would create a digital ecosystem.
“In the US, groups like Y Combinator are funding businesses at low levels and, in Europe, The Founders Fund is doing this.
“There are venture capitalists in the US waiting to bet on young businesses. It’s remarkable this hasn’t happened in Ireland yet. We should be supporting our young right now, instead of scaring them to death.
“For €10m a year, you could have 200 companies a year and 5% of them could emerge as Ireland’s answer to Microsoft or Nokia,” says Collins.
I’d say ‘Microsoft or Nokia’ might be a bit optimistic, but I applaud the philosophy.
On an unrelated note, I’m not a fan of the way the Irish Independent uses links. Like a few other newspaper sites, they link certain keywords such as ‘TechCrunch’ or ‘Wall Street Journal’ not to the sites, but to ‘topic pages’ on the Independent’s site.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
You can semi-instinctively tell when you see those automatically-generated keyword topic links, and I never click on them. They’re pretty much never useful. Real links tend to be phrases rather than single words, or if they are single words, they’re not names that can be picked out automatically as topics. Besides, those should be tags anyway, as they are on your site.
Economic development 2.0 .. haha, yes I said it, 2.0. This is not revolutionary nor is it 2.0. It’s just economic development that could work in the current web business environment. I think Ireland should go for it. Actually Canada too if we don’t do it. I know we do some grants but I don’t think we have a Y-Combinator. On the other hand, we DO have SRED but that’s slightly different than straight up entrepreneurship.
>For €50,000, you can get three or four guys in a >room for three or four months and they will build >a product and go to market.
That’s were the theory falls down…They (and you) might plan something but rarely anything of significance for the Market is delivered in 3 to 4 months. Very naive thinking above…Darren, you should know better to believe it..
Joe said it well, certainly. I know from personal experience that a few developers can go from zero to beta in three to four months. Nitobi’s PhoneGap is just one example.
Brian,
Its about starting. Not finishing. TechStars, Y-Combinator and SeedCamp all use this model very successfully to go from idea or prototype to full beta in a highly accelerated compressed fashion.
Check the startups emerging from these programs to determine if “… anything of significance for the market..” is delivered.
Joe.
in fact there are so many ways to be able to survive in the market. Maybe this program can help, we can try this case in order to be first. so we can learn more in order to survive or develop a business that has been built