Mr. Martin Shanahan:

There is actually a great opportunity now, based on what was announced yesterday, to develop regional plans. As I said earlier, either a senior manager from IDA Ireland or Enterprise Ireland will be charged with developing those plans, but both agencies will be involved in each region in the development of the plans. That will be about what we will do in each region, from a top-down perspective, but mainly it will be about trying to bring forward ideas from the regions themselves and the towns within them as to what they think they can do. That might involve a branding initiative, the development of a missing piece of infrastructure and so forth. For our part, we will help regions and towns identify what we believe are the most challenging areas in terms of attractiveness for foreign direct investment.

It would be very helpful from an IDA perspective for public representatives to talk up their areas and regions. That is hugely important because our clients can Google. They can Google the proceedings of these Houses and even the proceedings of this committee come up in Google searches-----