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 misnomer, since they are all (mostly) fully owned by the state, in addition not all of them are actually companies.