Dr. Pat Ivory:

On the trade front, we are very active as a member association and we very much welcomed the invitation from the Government to join the Export Trade Council. We participate actively in that group together with CEOs from several of our member companies. We are very happy to work in partnership with all the Government Departments involved in the group and, indeed, with the State agencies, including Enterprise Ireland, the IDA, Bord Bia and Tourism Ireland. This council has met on a number of occasions and I think, as the council is developing, there is a greater understanding of each other's positions and we are happy to see that there is a greater engagement with the private sector taking place as the council evolves. We would like to see that continue into the future.

IBEC and its sectoral associations greatly value the role played by Irish ambassadors and embassy staff abroad in a number of different areas, including trying to solve or help us solve market access issues and in their new role in terms of co-ordinating and supporting trade missions and the work of the agencies abroad. We think this is a very welcome development that there is an Ireland Inc. approach with all the agencies and the embassy staff, led by the ambassador, working together.

IBEC's own trade council meets on a quarterly basis and has done for a number of years. We interact with Government officials involved in trade policy and promotion on a regular basis through our trade council. The council formulates the business position on trade policy but I will come back to that later.

We were also delighted to work as part of the Forfás steering group on the report, Key Skills for Enterprise to Trade Internationally, which was published in June this year. We feel the recommendations of this report should be taken on board and we have emphasised that at the Export Trade Council. Again, we are very happy to work in partnership with Forfás and the State agencies in regard to implementing the recommendations of the report, specifically in building the marketing expertise and sales expertise of Irish SMEs and indigenous companies and also in improving the language skills in Ireland and building on foreign language capability.

On 30 November, IBEC in collaboration with UCC and Enterprise Ireland will run its second workshop on doing business in China. This is an initiative to try to enable SMEs and large Irish companies, when they are doing business in a market with which they are not that familiar, to gain an understanding of the culture in that market and of the differences of doing business in that market. This has been a good collaboration with the Institute of Asian Studies in UCC and Enterprise Ireland.

On the international front, in addition to the work we do in Ireland, IBEC is the Irish member of Business Europe, the leading Brussels-based organisation which brings together 41 different business and employers' confederations. We interact with the EU Commission and the EU Parliament as a group with Business Europe which strengthens the position in Ireland.

We actively participate in the organisation's international relations committee. I sit on that committee and my colleague, Ms Paula O'Dwyer, sits on the free trade agreement and the WTO working groups. I also chair the organisation's network for developing relations with the United States. It was in that context that I did some work in collaboration with Business Europe and the US Chamber of Commerce which I will refer to later and which was the subject of the material I sent to the Chairman of the committee ahead of the visit to the United States.

IBEC is also the Irish member of the Europe Services Forum which promotes trade in services globally. This is an emerging part of business and trade in Ireland. As members will know, approximately half of Irish exports are services exports. In addition to manufacturing exports, we have a strong services exports side. Mr. Danny McCoy, IBECs director general, will meet Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the EU Council, tomorrow to outline IBEC's business priorities for the Irish Presidency.

I will give members a flavour of our trade priorities and the key priorities which are part of the 50 action plan points to which Mr. Brendan Butler referred and also part of our business priorities for the EU Presidency. The first is to advance negotiations on an EU-US trade agreement. IBEC works in partnership with Business Europe and the US Chamber of Commerce to advance this objective. The core elements of the package include not just eliminating and reducing tariffs but also non-tariff barriers and looking at how we can build investment, open up public procurement markets in the European Union and the United States, jointly protect intellectual property created in our markets and have better levels of regulatory co-operation between the European Union and the United States. We are feeding into the EU-US high level working group on jobs and growth which was established in December 2011. It produced its interim report mid-year and is due to produce its final recommendations in December. The final recommendations may recommend the launch of comprehensive negotiations on a trade package between the European Union and the United States. There may be an opportunity to give a mandate to start these negotiations during the EU Presidency which Ireland will hold next year. In that context, we have agreed with the Government to hold a transatlantic business round table meeting on 18 April which will immediately follow the informal Trade Council which is being organised to take place in Dublin Castle. We will bring business leaders from Europe and the United States to participate in that business round table meeting.

One should not forget the importance of the emerging markets. We have been working vociferously to advance EU free trade agreements with Asian partners both with our business partners in Europe and individually as an organisation. We welcome the completion of the EU-Korea free trade agreement which entered into force on 1 July 2011. The negotiations with India are advanced and we hope the EU-Singapore free trade agreement can be finalised in 2012. We are pleased to see that negotiations with Vietnam have been launched. This is very positive from an Irish perspective since we now have an embassy in Vietnam. It is the first Asian country included in the Irish Aid programme which was focused mainly on Africa, in which we have opened an embassy. IBEC supports the launch of the free trade agreement negotiations with Japan and will be working with the ambassador in Japan, with the Japanese ambassador to Ireland and JETRO.

I draw the committee's attention to our support for implementation of the Africa strategy which has been launched by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Tánaiste and the Minister of State, Deputy Joe Costello. IBEC welcomes the increased focus on the potential to build trade links between Ireland and Africa. There is a good opportunity to move beyond the aid-type relationship to a more mature trade and aid based relationship. We know this is being welcomed by African countries and their ambassadors to Ireland. In that context, Ireland's Engineering Enterprises Federation, an affiliate of IBEC, launched a major new report, Winning Business in Africa - building a cluster for infrastructure projects. The report was launched earlier this year. We also actively participated in the second Africa Ireland Economic Forum, Building on Success, during which we presented the findings of the report at a workshop. We were very happy to engage in an exchange of views with the ambassador of Kenya to Ireland, Ms Catherine Muigai Mwangi, at the IBEC trade council meeting this morning. The meeting was very constructive and there was great engagement with the representatives of Government Departments and our member companies which are doing business in Africa.