Ms Mary Buckley:

We want to be more competitive in everything we do and that includes personal tax rates. Making those more competitive would be advantageous.

The €15 million will help us to cover our costs of construction for three new advanced buildings. In our strategy, which we developed at the end of 2015, we highlighted the areas on which we would be focusing from the perspective of constructing new buildings to help attract clients to regional locations. Our focus in that regard has been on Athlone and Waterford, where we constructed two buildings in 2015. We recently sold one of them to a company called OPKO in the life sciences sector, creating 200 jobs. We are marketing the second, in Athlone, at the moment. We are currently constructing three buildings across the country, one in Tralee, one in Castlebar and one in Sligo and they will be complete next year. We then move onto the next phase and we anticipate that the additional funding will cover the cost of three buildings in Limerick, Galway and Dundalk.