Ms Julie Sinnamon:

I will ask Mr. Sherry to talk about the Brexit side. While we have not done work on that, there has been a lot written on the implications of it, and we have shared that and talked to our clients about it.

The Deputy mentioned the skills side. That is probably the No. 1 issue our companies are facing at this point in time and the sector where the issue is biggest is on the ICT side. One of the things which is currently being tendered is a portal to help people here identify skills from anywhere relevant in order to try to match the skills available with the jobs available. We have worked closely with the companies on the question of apprenticeships, in particular engineering companies, so they have been very involved in terms of feeding into and proactively pushing to get the various apprenticeship programmes going. It is not being done alongside us but the companies and ourselves are very actively involved in it.

The 40,000 target in the three-year strategy is a gross target. We are actually ahead of that target at the end of the first year and we will be reviewing those numbers at the end of this year in terms of the stretch associated with it, depending on the outcome.

The procurement opportunity domestically is significant. Enterprise Ireland has a team of people who are basically working full-time in trying to help Irish companies access the public procurement opportunities that are there. We have done a number of pilots this year in the Small Business Innovation Research, SBIR, competition, which is helping small companies specifically. For example, one was with ESB on the electric car side, where we would get a specific programme to try to identify potential suppliers on metering for charging points for electric vehicles. The intention was that this would be open to small companies. It has been very successful and has now rolled out into a couple of areas.

I will ask Mr. Hayes to cover the local authorities and the question of the loss of independence of LEOs.