Ms Marie Byrne:

I will focus on my own experience, which is very much on the whiskey side of the house. Deputy Heydon raised an interesting point regarding the opportunities and obstacles facing the burgeoning whiskey industry. Education is vital. Scotland has a fantastic educational institution, Heriot-Watt University, where people can study for a degree in distilling. What I have in mind is the provision of a one-year masters or something like that for agriculture graduates. Companies like mine would be delighted to take in young graduates and spend time giving them hands-on experience. What we would get in return is access to the new and innovative ideas those graduates are learning about on a dedicated distilling course. One lesson we have learned from the Scottish experience is that the Scotch Whisky Association is so rigid in its prescription of what Scotch whiskey should be that it is actually tending to stifle innovation. Scotch is the category leader and we are chasing after it. Embracing innovation is important in that regard.

The Deputy asked about the size of the whiskey export opportunity. In 2013, exports from the Republic amounted to €307 million, or €350 million if one includes Northern Ireland. In Scotland, exports of Scotch whisky are worth £4.3 billion. There is a huge gap to be bridged but the potential is there to do it. As I said, education is a major issue. There are massive opportunities around bioethanol, warehousing, increasing malt and barley production and so on. There are probably not enough suppliers into the distilling business at this time. If I had lots of money, the next business opportunity I would consider would be looking at other ways of getting a reduced price in bringing in malt and barley. In addition, the smaller distilleries probably do not have the capability to bring in large tonnage of barley, especially in the city centre. I can only take it in one-tonne bags. New and innovative approaches in the malting industry present significant opportunities for growth.

There also are real opportunities for growth in terms of employment. For example, we are looking at a cost of €10 million plus to get ourselves up and running and taking in at least 35 to 40 people in the next couple of years. There is a knock-on effect for tourism. We are located 600 m from St. Patrick's Cathedral, for instance, which gets 200,000 tourists annually. We will be looking to attract some of those visitors as well as tourists who would come to Ireland specifically to visit a new distillery. The interesting thing about brewery and whiskey tourists is that they are generally high net worth individuals who spend three or four additional nights in hotel rooms annually and have a higher net spend compared with other tourists. There is a massive amount of research from brewers in the United States and Scotland that we can leverage. When one considers that Scotland receives 1.2 million whiskey tourists per year, the size of the prize is clear.

Senator Mooney asked where I would like to see our whiskey being sold. I would not like to have spent more than five years developing what I hope to be an absolutely magnificent whiskey only to see it being sold in an off-licence at below cost by staff who do not have the expertise and attention to detail to educate customers about it. We do not want to see publicans serving it who have not been trained and cannot advise a customer against throwing a large measure of cola on top. With any premium product there is a requirement for those who sell or serve it to have a degree of expertise. We certainly are not targeting under-age drinkers. Given that our price point will be €40 plus per bottle, I do not see any 16 year old choosing it over a €7 flagon of vodka. We are trying to promote a premium product. My background is in agriculture and I have always been tremendously proud of the quality of our agricultural produce. We have always punched above our weight in that regard.