Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The challenge for an opposition TD is to focus on the problems without doing us down. That is the difficulty because we obviously want to make sure that we have a positive message to send. The truth is that in so many areas and especially in the greater Dublin area we are currently at infrastructure capacity, whether it is housing, transport, hospitals, education etc. Two years ago we had PayPal asking its staff to tell them whether they had a spare room or not so that they could offer that to their workers. That is a major difficulty. We cannot underestimate it. We have a job to make sure that we actually focus on it.

In general, the major difficulty that we have at the moment is that there is so much conjecture. There is also a lot of confusion within businesses. InterTradeIreland has identified that 98% of businesses do not have plans to deal with Brexit because of this confusion. It is quite clear from the witnesses' evidence that our market here is very intermeshed with the British market in many ways.

The funds sector, while very large in terms of money, is probably the same size as the horse industry in terms of jobs and there are about 14,000 jobs in the horse sector. Jobs per euro, there is a very different ratio to what there would be to different sectors within the economy. What types of exposures exist in the funds sector to the Irish economy? Perhaps the witnesses might talk us through that first of all.