Mr. John Flynn:

There are a couple of statistics that would shed light on that. There has been a significant increase in investment activity as a percentage of gross domestic product, GDP. We are second in Europe on that scale.

Other initiatives have been taken by certain agencies, including, most notably, Enterprise Ireland, and also IDA Ireland, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund and the venture capital community over the past period. That has propelled Ireland to a very good platform at the moment for an expansive opportunity in a competitive sense. This includes the seed investment programmes brought to bear again through the pillar banks investing and Enterprise Ireland's activities in terms of leadership programmes. There has been a quadrupling from 16 to 64 seed investments per annum, which is a significant improvement, and we have also had quite a lot of investment into what we would term "pre-pipeline" development, with approximately 18 or so incubators and accelerators which help very early stage companies come together with mentor programmes. That would compare well with any other geography. There tends to be clusters of different venture and early stage activity, and Dublin is one of the hotter clusters within a European context. It is second to main clusters in the US, which are on the west coast at Silicon Valley.