Ireland's first national Space Strategy for Enterprise by the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovationaims aims to set out how Ireland can maximise the benefit of its investment in the European Space Agency (ESA) and in the European Union's (EU) flagship space programmes, Copernicus, Galileo and Horizon 2020.

Innovative researchers in companies, Higher Education Institutes and public bodies are being encouraged to apply for the next stage of EU Horizon 2020 funding.

Researchers and companies in Ireland have won a total of €274.7 million in funding from the EU Horizon 2020 programme for research projects. The Higher Education system accounted for €172.5 million of this total and companies secured €79.2 million, including €54.3 million for SMEs.

Horizon 2020 (H2020) is the EU's Programme to support Research and Innovation. It has a budget of €75 billion and runs from 2014 to 2020. From January 2014-November 2015 Ireland had won €251 million. This performance has Ireland on track to achieve the national target of €1.25bn.

Over 580 projects with Irish participation have won a total of €251m in competitive funding from Horizon 2020, the European Union's programme for Research and Innovation.

Ireland’s researchers and companies netted €127 million in EU funding in 2014, the first year of Horizon 2020, the current EU programme funding research and innovation. Ireland’s success exceeded the Action Plan for Jobs 2014 national target for 2014 by 27%.