Ms Anne Lanigan:

The focus with our clients currently is to encourage them to prepare as much as they can for Brexit. There is a sense that there is a lot of uncertainty and we are not sure what is going to happen, so there is a risk that companies will not take action. We are very much encouraging them to prepare, and to prepare for a hard Brexit. That has been the objective behind the scorecard. We have a regional roadshow that we started in Cork yesterday. We will go to Waterford, Monaghan, Galway and Limerick over the next month to encourage companies to see what their peers are doing. We bring in clients who we have seen reacting to Brexit in the right way by putting measures in place. That is a real focus for us. The scorecard is available to all companies and it is not just for Enterprise Ireland clients. We have a grant that is specific to our client base but the scorecard is available to all. I encourage all members to use it as anyone can do so; one just needs to log in and create a password. It is worth doing to understand the different areas of exposure for businesses. There has been a lot of focus on the currency, which has settled at 85p to the euro at the moment. Many of our companies say they can cope with that rate but we need to get them to look beyond that and into the other areas where they may be exposed, for example, if there was a downturn in the UK economy or an issue affecting their supply chains. There is much talk about the North-South issues, which are very important to us, but there is also the east-west aspect and the custom and barriers we expect to come in to play there. These are all part of what we call the nine areas of exposure. We focus on those areas and try to translate them into what it will mean for each of our companies.