Mr. Terry Clune:

There is an enormous community of participants in ConnectIreland, and we now have 78,000 connectors. Some of the connectors are recent graduates and others are very senior business people. We have been very lucky that Mr. Michael O'Leary from Ryanair has given ConnectIreland significant coverage across Ryanair's in-flight magazine in the past two years.

People really understand what we are looking for. It is not a difficult ask. What we ask people to do is simply to keep their eyes and ears open for Ireland. During St. Patrick's week the Tricolour was out in force. There is massive loyalty to Ireland and this initiative gives people something useful they can do, a simple channel through which they can keep their eyes open and if they hear of a company that is expanding to Europe, they should let us know and we in ConnectIreland will take it from there. This concept has been working very successfully.

In terms of the numbers, SLM Connect's numbers are not included in the IDA's 527 verified list. The IDA has not verified them. We hope that as part of a review, the verification process or how long it takes to verify the jobs would be looked at and reviewed. Equally, and we cannot discuss it here unfortunately, the red lighting issue would be a key aspect of what we would like to be able to review and ensure that issues and opportunities are not lost for Ireland. We have a significant number of red lighted companies. We would hope that in a review of the project with the Department and IDA that we would be able to overcome that issue in the future and that those companies would no longer be blocked to Ireland.