Mr. Tom Hayes:

No, I appreciate that. I am just coming back to it because the figures for this year thus far, which I have provided, are much higher. I had the good fortune to work overseas for a number of years on behalf of Irish companies entering the market. I assure members that business must be won and re-won all day and every day. Regardless of whether someone wins a contract today to supply a major multiple or a systems integrator or a major telecommunications company, such business must be re-won day in, day out through innovating one's product, through research and development, further sales and marketing and through further investment. Consequently, the 140,000 dependent jobs and the other 300,000 indirect jobs must be fought for all day every day. Back in 2011, when competing against companies right around the globe, that was a major challenge. This year, as I noted, we have seen an increase in that regard. More companies are undertaking research and development this year than was the case last year. More companies are undertaking job expansion programmes this year than last year and more companies are undertaking management development programmes. These all are signs that companies are in a position to at least grow and develop and hopefully this will continue over the next number of years.

As for the local authorities, the Government has made a decision in this regard. Part of that decision refers to the one-stop shop and part of it refers to education. I addressed a conference of county and city managers last Friday, at which one county manager made a presentation. I detected therein that they are learning and that an education is under way. While there is an education and a learning to be undertaken by them, they recognise that and this probably is the beginning of a process that already has commenced. In respect of the jobs, I mentioned Enterprise Ireland's high-potential start-up division. This pertains to high-potential start-ups only and does not include our established cohort of client companies. However, over the past ten to 12 years, there have been 12,000 direct jobs. Moreover, these are really sustainable jobs because they are in areas such as biotechnology, the life sciences, the Internet, gaming and telecommunication companies. We have some superb companies supplying to global players in the telecommunications sector, many of which would not be well-known names. However, such companies exist and employ 30, 40, 50 or in one case, almost 800 people. The latter company won the entrepreneur of the year award last year and is planning to take the initial public offering, IPO, route. Many such companies are working away and the jobs fallout therefrom is very low. As for the failure rate, it is quite modest among such companies. While I do not know the precise percentage, it is very small. The main reason for this is Enterprise Ireland invests taxpayers' money and consequently, we ensure a real and significant level of due diligence is undertaken on each project in which we invest. We consider it from the perspectives of the market opportunity, the technology - we will not have any firm coming through that lacks the proper technology - and the financial and the commercial viability of the project, because our money always must be matched by funds coming in from the private sector. We will carry out a due diligence process in this regard and many of the entrepreneurs thank us for so doing, because they realise they have been through a fairly rigorous process in respect of assessing a project and usually are much stronger and better in consequence. Such companies usually survive and many of them now are in the process of going through an accelerated growth programme because we also try to pick winners. We try to support companies that will add value, create the jobs and hopefully will go on to become large-scaling companies into the future.