Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Both witnesses are very welcome. Their opening statement is to the point. It is pretty blunt and pretty sobering. I would like to pick up on Mr. Daly's very welcome emphasis on Irish-owned companies. There is a danger with such strong total export figures last year, being the highest on record, that we miss the fact that Irish-owned companies account for only 13%. While the multinationals are eminently welcome here and long may they come and grow, the ESRI's recent analysis is that the exports from Irish-owned companies are not where they need to be. In fact, the international data suggest that we sell rather than scale. On his point, we have focused on the Anglo-Saxon world. Most Irish exporters that I know do not really differentiate between selling in Cork and selling in Birmingham, for example. The UK is seen largely as a domestic market. I, therefore, very much welcome his pointing to that and the fact there is a huge opportunity.

In fact the single greatest opportunity for Brexit is not to get the banking authority or the medicines authority but to use it as a stimulus for many of our firms finally to move beyond, largely, the UK. To that end, specifically for the Irish-owned firms, as the multinationals have all manner of sophistication and resources available to them in international supply chains, if Mr. Daly were to prioritise one, two or three things the State could do for them, some more than others, to help them understand and mitigate the Brexit related risks they are facing but also, critically, to start viewing Brexit as the necessary push for them to do everything they can not just to continue selling into and buying from the UK but also to move beyond that to the Baltic countries, the Nordic countries, central Europe - Mr. McKeever gave the example of Morocco - what would they be?