Mr. Kevin Sherry:

No, we are not prohibited from funding them, we provide funding, as the chief executive officer has said, through research and development but, obviously, they will not receive funding from Enterprise Ireland and from Údarás for the same activities.

In terms of Ireland House and areas to develop, we fundamentally restructured our overseas network during the past four years. We closed some offices, merged some offices and opened new offices. We downsized offices and then resized them because of the needs for our clients in taking account of different markets areas. We have 33 offices overseas. In 20 of those locations we are co-located with either an embassy or a consulate or a consul general. In a further six of those locations where such entities are not present we are co-located with another State agency and when no other players are present, for instance, as in Johannesburg where the embassy is in Pretoria, we have our own office. In some such cases we are co-located and in that particular example we share an office with ESBI. In addition to having our own offices, we have built out during the past three years what we call our pathfinder, our trade consultant network. These are people who have specific expertise in particular sector areas. At this stage we have more than 350 of those people around the globe to whom we introduce clients, who can liaise with them in terms of specialist items of work that need to be undertaken.

With respect to China, it has featured significantly in the news with the lowering of growth rates there but they are still above 6%. It is still an enormous and important market for our clients. Exports continue to grow strongly there. We do not target the market in general. We are very specific in most overseas markets about targeting specific sector areas where there is clear capability on the part of Irish companies to both address and deliver on opportunities in those markets. There is a big opportunity for Irish companies in some of those high-growth markets but it is in very specific sectors, and in some far distant markets it can be more on the international traded service activities rather than on the product side. A good example of that would be in Latin America where import duties are very high, where barriers to entry are also high and where companies need to have, for example, a very compelling product proposition that is not available in the marketplace. That happens on occasion. We have a client company in the north west that was successfully exporting self-erecting cranes into Brazil but that does not happen very often.

It tends to be more in financial services, educational services, engineering services and other sectors. The Deputy is right that we are only scratching the surface in Latin America. It is a difficult market, not one for every company. Companies that go into it need to be well prepared and well resourced to go the distance. The same applies to some of the more challenging markets in Asia. As nearer and more mature markets recover, we will have a greater challenge to encourage and ensure companies will remain committed to these higher growth but more distant markets because in the longer term they will represent a larger percentage of global trade. It is important that we continue to invest not just in the short term but in the long term in these markets, which is why, even during the difficult times of the past three years, we got agreement from the Government to put additional resources into these high growth markets.