Mr. John James O'Hara:

We run Pure Life Pure Irish, a Facebook page on which we post photographs, Irish poems, jokes and culture, covering Leitrim, Sligo, Donegal, Fermanagh and parts of Mayo. We started the page this earlier this year and we have had more than 6,000 likes. We hope to join up with two other groups by Christmas, Campus.ie and goireland.com in the United States. Campus.ie is the largest student website, based in Dublin, and is used by a significant international network. Students from Oman and the other places in the Middle East have given us a level of help that is unreal. We are also working with them. We brought them to a horse sale in Leitrim. We are setting up a network with them to bring horses to Oman. We attract people to come here by showing them different aspects of life. This can make a major difference to various industries. We have no market in this country for horses, but there is a market for them in Oman. We must start somewhere. We have started with social media and the student network in the colleges. They know their countries best. In Oman the potato is a very expensive product, but one can buy them here for little or nothing. If we develop other industries - it does not just have to be tourism - it could have a major impact.

Pure Life Irish Tours is a new company that was set up last year. We work with our partner, Wild West Irish Tours in the States. We rely on tourists from the United States to give us a kick start. This year we are going directly to the market. We have had no funding until now. The company is self-funded. We have been told there is no funding in the kitty for international marketing in 2014. That is a major problem. I do the web design and we employ one person to do optimisation. We are a very small company but we are developing a network in north Leitrim. We are developing a driving route from Leitrim into Northern Ireland and back through Sligo.