Pat Breen (Clare, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have visited and been in contact with many of our embassies and they are extremely active in the areas of diplomacy and trade. Ireland has a small network of embassies which cannot be compared to those of the British, the Americans, the Japanese or the Danes. Ireland's embassies are small operations. The embassies of other countries might be run by 40 to 50 staff, while Ireland's may only be operated by four or five. This aspect must be taken into consideration. Our embassies do a great job with the limited resources available to them. I would like our embassy network to be expanded. Perhaps we might consider the locations in which it is important to have embassies and consulates such as Jakarta in Indonesia, the United States, Latin America and South America. For example, we have only two embassies in South America, but we could have many more. We hope we can, as a committee, give some direction to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in this matter. I hope we can work with the Department and our guests. This meeting has been extremely useful and great exchanges have taken place between members and guests. We experimented with a different format and it worked well. The outcome is better when there are exchanges back and forth.

I again thank our guests for coming before us and apologise about the mix-up in respect of Question Time. Deputies Brendan Smith and Seán Crowe would have liked to have been present, but they were obliged to be in the Dáil for the taking of Priority Questions. The information shared at this meeting will be useful to the committee when it is compiling its report.