Dr. Pat Ivory:

In terms of the Africa strategy and working in partnership so as to get a better foothold and tenders for Irish companies, this is specifically what the report looked into. It looked at building a cluster for infrastructure projects and at helping Irish engineering companies and companies with project management expertise to gain access to international tenders, possibly ones funded by the European Commission, the European Investment Bank or the World Bank. Previously, our scale of operation has, to an extent, excluded us from participating in these tenders. The report produced for us by Schuman Associates in Brussels, in collaboration with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Irish Engineering Enterprises Federation, specifically looks into this. There is a proposal between us and Enterprise Ireland to develop a cluster of these engineering companies here to become involved in tendering to win business. One of the initiatives we would like to see would be to see Ireland joining the African Development Bank and this has been raised with the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Joe Costello. We are already members of the Asian Development Bank. Obviously, there is a cost involved in joining, but it is well worth considering.

On the question as to why we chose UCC, the answer is simple. UCC came to us and asked us if we would be interested in developing something with it. We worked with UCC for over a year to try to tailor its programme to be as business focused as possible and when we reached a stage where we were both happy with it, we ran a workshop together a year ago. That was very successful and well attended and we now have a second workshop planned. There is good interest in the workshop, which will be a full-day workshop in IBEC. The reason we selected UCC was because the school of Asian studies and Irish Institute of Chinese Studies in UCC came to us and said they were interested in doing something and asked us to work with them. Of course, we agreed.