R&D Grants Ireland

Enterprise Ireland is the central agency for indigenous export focused firms and administers many of the most used R&D Grants Ireland schemes.

Typical schemes relevant to CFOs

Agile Innovation Fund

• Supports development of new or substantially improved products, services or processes.
• Usually for projects up to €300,000, with funding intensities that can be attractive for SMEs.
• Fast turnaround, suited to companies that need to move quickly on technical and digital innovation.

Example: A Dublin SaaS company uses Agile Innovation to fund a six month AI module development, covering a material share of developer time and cloud costs while preserving equity raised in a recent seed round.

Innovation Partnership Programme

• Co funds industry led projects with Irish research organisations.
• Grants of up to 80 per cent of eligible research costs, normally capped around €200,000 for standard projects, with higher limits in specific cases.
• Ideal for companies that need access to specialist labs, equipment or academic expertise.

Example: An advanced manufacturing SME in Munster partners with a university materials lab to develop new coatings. The Innovation Partnership covers most of the lab work, while the company funds internal engineering and commercialisation.

Other Enterprise Ireland innovation supports

• Feasibility and planning grants for early concept validation.
• Commercialisation and market discovery supports for export oriented firms.

In practice, many companies will step from feasibility or Agile Innovation into larger Innovation Partnership projects as confidence and customer traction build.

Irish R&D grants and the R&D Corporation Tax Credit are designed to be complementary, but they cannot usually fully fund the same cost twice. In practice, grant funding reduces the qualifying expenditure on which you can claim the R&D credit.

Key interaction points for CFOs:

Net of grant principle

• Revenue guidance requires grant aided R&D costs to be reviewed so that only the net company borne expenditure enters the R&D credit base.
• This applies whether the grant comes from Enterprise Ireland, IDA, Horizon Europe or other public sources.

State aid ceilings

• Many R&D grants are notified state aid with specific maximum funding intensities.
• The R&D tax credit is generally treated as a separate measure, but combined support still needs to respect EU state aid rules at project level.

Effective benefit stacking

• Even after netting off grants, the R&D tax credit at 35 per cent provides a substantial additional benefit on qualifying spend, on top of the normal tax deduction.
• In many cases, the combined effect of grants plus tax credit leaves the company funding significantly less than half of the gross project cost.

Illustrative example

• DTIF project: total eligible Irish company cost €4 million.
• DTIF grant covers 50 per cent of eligible costs: €2 million.
• Net company borne R&D cost: €2 million.
• Irish R&D tax credit at 35 per cent on the €2 million net cost: €700,000, in addition to the corporation tax deduction.

From a funding stack perspective, the project is effectively financed €2.7 million by the state and €1.3 million by the company before any IP or future KDB benefits.

For this to hold up under enquiry, you need clean project coding, grant ledger accounts that reconcile to the tax computation and documentation showing how net of grant adjustments were made.