On the Entrepreneurship Policy Discourse in Ireland: Between Incentives for Success and Remedies for Failure

This compact study focuses on the three major policy influencing enterprise reports of the last three decades; Telesis 1982, Culliton 1992, O'Driscoll 2004 to determine the policy orientation of the Irish Government over the last 30 years. Expanding on a framework put forward by Dennis to categorise policy orientation of governments, we examine the path of policy making in Ireland and find that Irish policy has a resolute focus on interventions to support successful risk taking and has assiduously avoided considering reducing the effects of failure. From our analysis we also find that there has been no significant directional change in policy making in the O'Driscoll report 2004, in spite of calls from Europe since 2000 for countries to review insolvency legislation and make it easier for honest entrepreneurs to make a 'fresh start'.