A
State-Sponsored Body is the name given in
Ireland to a
state-owned enterprise (a government-owned corporation), that is to say, a commercial business which is beneficially owned, either completely or majority, by the
Irish Government. Each state-sponsored body has a sponsor Minister who acts as shareholder, either independently, or in conjunction with the
Minister for Finance, who may also be a shareholder. State-sponsored bodies are often popularly called
semi-state companies, a misnomner, since they are all (mostly) fully owned by the state, in addition not all of them are actually companies. Less often they are referred to by the British term
nationalised industry.