Mr. Fergal O'Brien:

Brexit has been a slow burning issue for many businesses. Some sectors quickly diagnosed what Brexit would mean for them. They started contingency planning and examined their supply chain exposure. The food sector is highly advanced in terms of its awareness and planning for Brexit, as is traditional manufacturing.

In the SME sector, many owner managers are overwhelmed by the uncertainty and the challenges of Brexit. As there are so many unknowns and moving parts, they are almost incapable of planning. We all need to do a lot of work. From an IBEC perspective, we have published a detailed toolkit for our members to help them to step through all the key business issues they need to consider. We know that Enterprise Ireland, Bord Bia and others have similar tools. However, there are still many companies that are either overwhelmed by the challenge of Brexit or have not fully thought through where the implications of it might be buried in their supply chain. They might not see a direct exposure to the UK, but there are many companies with indirect exposures they have not yet recognised. There is a lot of awareness raising to be done.

In terms of the infrastructure asks, to summarise it, the first ask is that we have ambition in terms of the resources and the scale of a capital plan. We genuinely believe that the new national planning framework coupled with a ten-year investment plan is the most important opportunity in a generation to plan and build the kind of infrastructure we need for a much better Ireland, a much better society and economy and, crucially, a better spatial distribution of where economic activity happens. The first ask, therefore, is to see us come up towards a modern European standard in terms of how much we are investing in our infrastructure and all elements of that infrastructure.

In terms of the priorities, we see significant challenge in terms of public transport provision, starting with but not confined to our major cities. We think we will have to see significant scale generated around the main cities. We would strongly favour a national planning framework and investment strategy that would target a lot of resources at our regional cities. That will mean public transport within those regional cities and within Dublin, which is clearly under significant pressure.

The second crucial point is the connectivity between these regional cities in terms of both public transport and the road network. A lot of infrastructure was delivered prior to the crash but it was transport infrastructure that all led to Dublin. Getting that mindset changed to one about connecting the regional cities to each other is probably one of the most significant elements of a new plan. We need to be particularly conscious of the regions that are, first, underperforming anyway in terms of recovery and, second, will be most exposed to Brexit. We would argue that the west and north-west corridors should be strongly examined. We see particular Brexit challenges where the provision of improved infrastructure could make a significant difference.