Mr. Martin Murray:

About three or four years ago, when FÁS was terminated as an entity.

I was also asked about Farmleigh. It was a very good education programme within UCC which was followed up in Singapore. As to why it finished, we hear different reasons, but the original concept was that Irish graduates would be trained in Ireland, learn language skills, go to Singapore and work in companies there. In reality, they ended up working primarily with Irish companies in Singapore, although that had its own advantages.

The problem, if my understanding is correct, arose from the Singapore side not buying into scheme. It was assumed large numbers of Singapore graduates would come here but, in reality, they wanted to go to Harvard or Oxford. There were some structural issues in terms of how the programme was all put together. Nevertheless, it has produced a number of talented Irish graduates in the region.

My colleague will deal with the questions on the brand Ireland concept.

It was noted that we are a small island and there needs to be a more joined-up approach. I absolutely agree. A key conclusion of the Dublin Castle discussions with the Irish heads of mission was the need for everybody to work together to create the critical momentum where we do things of significance. Asia Business Week Ireland is an example of this, with a lot of things happening at the same time. Senator Walsh pointed out that for many Asian people, there is a connection with music when it comes to their perception of Ireland. That certainly is an avenue to explore. It is another area with potential for co-operation. This year, we are staging an Asia fashion event in Ireland to reciprocally show Ireland's creativity and expertise in this sphere. The fashion world is very important.

Reference was made to the Riverdance theatrical production, which is made up of very talented people. It is a highly successful commercial organisation with enormous goodwill towards Ireland. I understand the Riverdance production team plans its programme a long time in advance. Perhaps Tourism Ireland might work with the people involved to plan its own promotion programme to coincide with the staging of the show in different cities. I recall coming out of the Riverdance production in Tokyo alongside thousands of happy Japanese people and thinking this would be the perfect time for somebody to be giving out brochures in Japanese telling them all about Ireland. It is all about that type of joined-up thinking and working together.

I will ask Ms FitzGerald-Smith to respond to the questions about language barriers and so on. She has fluency in Mandarin and I am fluent in Japanese. She is probably better able to comment on language as an issue.

We have seen how the one-stop-shop or Ireland House idea works on the ground. In Japan and Korea, for example, it has been very effective. With the greatest respect, however, some Asian cities are so large and the traffic issues so difficult that the time taken simply to get from one place to another reduces the impact of having VIPs coming to meet the ambassador and bringing everybody together.

I, too, was surprised that the individual referred to in the Asian Development Bank was clearly not aware of Ireland's food and agritech expertise. Perhaps it points to how busy we are between the inbox and work schedules and unless we make a focused effort of targeted promotion to key people, we will not get the recognition we are seeking. In the case of this particular individual, I did not really ask anything about it for fear of causing that person embarrassment. After all, we cannot expect him or her to know all about us. Perhaps that person was newly appointed to the role and had only recently assumed responsibility in matters to do with agriculture. Ireland's membership of the Asian Development Bank is essentially run through the Department of Finance, so I reported the matter to the key people, as well as to people in the food and agritech agencies.

I thank Deputy Eric Byrne for his comments. To answer his question about conferences, we organise a lot of such events, including in Asia because they create a huge momentum. Those conferences are effectively EU-Asia conferences. When we have done them in Tokyo and Beijing, for instance, all the EU stakeholders are in the city, together with local government representatives and Asian colleagues from further afield. It is an EU-Asia engagement but the event is being run by an Irish organisation, which very much puts Ireland on the radar. We work closely with the ambassador and other members of team Ireland on those events.

I will ask my colleague to deal more comprehensively with the questions about education. We are partnering with the Higher Education Authority during Asia Business Week Ireland to focus on how efforts might be co-ordinated. I agree that the Columban Fathers are doing incredible work in the region. I have stayed with them in Japan and they are amazing people, as are the Jesuits. There is huge linkage potential there. The HEA has done some work in this regard in Brazil and that model is there to be replicated in Asia.

Speaking generally, as well as the lack of joined-up thinking, another problem is that there is sometimes a focus on process over progress when, in fact, our focus needs be to on progress over process. Of course, we have to do things in the right manner but the emphasis should always be on getting things done, making progress and achieving results rather than fixating on the process.

My understanding, on which I am open to correction, is that the number of Malaysian students coming to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland is beginning to dip. A factor in this regard may be that the college's fees are deemed expensive compared with those of some competitor institutions. The RCSI is a fine institution and the prospects are good, particularly if the memorandum of understanding with Indonesia comes online.

Dublin Institute of Technology has a wonderful programme of collaboration with Irish Aid under which it is training people from Laos in tourism skills. I met a lot of people from the education sector on our recent trip to meet with ASEAN member states, including among the staff at the Asian Development Bank. Many of them made the interesting point that Asia no longer wants to be simply a marketing recruitment ground for students for Europe. Instead, it wants European institutions to go into Asia and partner with them. The DIT programme is a perfect example of that and is deserving of support. I am not familiar with any changes in the programme.

Reference was made to internships and building relationships. I will take a little credit in this area in that I was vice chairman of a Dublin-Beijing committee which had a useful engagement with our Chinese counterparts. When they told us they had more than 45 twin town and sister city relationships - I understand the number is now up to 60 - I asked how many of those relationships are really strong. I was told that only three fell into that category and when I asked why, they said those particular relationships were strong because they talk to each other all the time. It was out of this engagement with Beijing that the idea of internships developed. It has meant we have ambassadors for Dublin and Ireland who go back to Beijing. Last year I spent three months there and it is clearly a win-win for everybody. It would be great if we could extend that engagement to other locations.

Deputy Ó Snodaigh asked the reasons for some of the delays we have encountered. To be fair, team Ireland is working well with us and we get fantastic support from all Departments and agencies. Again, delays are generally due to a lack of joined-up thinking. It is sometimes worrying to see different people spending minimal resources essentially doing the same thing. Instead, there should be a parcelling out of responsibilities according to whether internal people or external people can do them more effectively. Everyone is busy and it is a question of how to get Ireland on people's radar in a focused way.

In regard to the EFL sector, what happened was very tragic. As a former chief executive officer of the Association of Compliance Officers in Ireland, I have some experience in this area. As I am no longer in that role, I am in a position to make the general observation that in some cases, we may have too much regulation while in others we do not have enough. To clarify, I am speaking on this point in a personal capacity.

There was a question about how we can enhance travellers' experience. Sometimes less is more and the focus should be on quality. What we find is that Ireland has become very good on the hard skills. Indeed, we are now very American in our style, with an emphasis on getting bang for one's buck, value propositions and key performance indicators. The danger in all of this is that it may be causing us to lose our strengths in the soft skills. Asians are quite different from us in that they are focused on building relationships. For an Asian business person, decisions on whether to go into partnership with another person are based on three considerations: the first is whether that person is credible, which is essentially about who the person is and by whom he or she was introduced; the second is whether one likes the other person, which is a human thing based on respect; and the third is whether one can trust the person. If an Asian business person believes in the other person, likes him or her and trusts him or her, the two of them will definitely be doing business; the only question is what it makes sense to do. In Ireland, it is the opposite way around - a type of clinical approach based on performance goals and so on. We need to meet somewhere in the middle.

In regard to the Irish going to Australia, everybody is trying to get a look in there. Beijing is trying to get them to go to Beijing. Experts like Kevin Toland of the Dublin Airport Authority know what needs to be done. Again, a Minister with overall co-ordinating responsibility could invite key experts to put this together.

It is very sad that we have almost 13,000 Filipinos working in Ireland, many of them contributing wonderfully to our health care and elder care services, but they have no embassy to represent them. The Filipino embassy shut down shortly after we officially opened there, but I assure the committee there was no connection between the two events. Essentially, the ambassador became ill and, as sometimes happens in bureaucracies, the role was subsumed into London, which does not allow the same the same level of engagement.