Local Enterprise Office Cork City, can accept applications for its financial supports from start-up or established businesses that fulfil the following criteria. The criteria below apply to Feasibility, Priming and Business Expansion & Export Development Grants.
Eligible Business Types
- A business located, registered and operating in the Cork City region
- A business employing up to 10 employees
- A manufacturing or internationally traded services business
- A domestically traded services business that can demonstrate the potential to export
- The enterprise must be in the commercial sphere
- The enterprise must demonstrate a market for the product/service
- The enterprise must have a capacity for growth and new job creation
Additionally, we require that:-
- Adequate finance will be available to fund the project including its operating costs
- The promoters possess sufficient management and technical capacity to implement the proposed project
- The project complies with existing policies and permits, licences and authorisations required under any statute regulation or order having the force of law
Ineligible Business & Projects
- Retail enterprises, personal services, professional services (including consultancies), generic services or construction and local building services are not eligible for grant aid
- Areas of enterprise which involve displacement of existing jobs or business: Builders, Hairdressers, Cafés, Pubs, Hotels, General Printers, Construction, Trades etc., would come within this category. Generally, where there are a large number of operators within a sector, the Local Enterprise Office has to have a regard to the implications of grant aiding one or some, possibly putting the others at a competitive disadvantage
- Conferences and Seminars
- Projects which are contrary to public policy
- Duplication of support for projects which would be eligible for assistance from other State Agencies or EU funded Operational Programmes
- Existing Firms which already have an established relationship with Enterprise Ireland or IDA. Please do not apply to the Local Enterprise Office if you have an existing application for the same project under consideration by Enterprise Ireland
- Projects involving primary agricultural production
- Projects with employees in excess of 10 people
- Mobile assets, i.e. cars, motor vans, laptops, mobile machinery etc.
- Where specific potential for job displacement exists (i.e. where a new business could only prosper by diverting sales, output, or employment away an existing local business(es) already providing essentially the same offering, thus placing existing jobs and the viability of the existing business(es) at risk);
- Projects deemed to be capable of proceeding in any event without LEO assistance i.e. deadweight
- Projects essentially comprising importation and distribution
- Own Labour Research costs
Terms & Conditions
- Funding will not be awarded for projects that have already commenced. Full approval by the Local Enterprise Office must be obtained before grant aid can be paid.
- The Local Enterprise Office must be furnished with receipts before payment of funding.
- Projects must comply with planning and legislative requirements.
- The project promoter and any sub-contractors employed by him / her must furnish the Local Enterprise Office with a Tax Clearance Certificate.
