Mr. Kieran Donoghue:

I will zero on the Deputy's focus on tax. Tax was a factor but it certainly was not the principal driver. Another interesting feature of those 20 investments is that the majority are what we call new name investments. By that, we mean that they had no pre-existing presence in Ireland. A reason multinationals have traditionally selected the UK as a base is exactly the same reason for which they select Ireland: it is a platform from which to service the wider EU market. The Brexit decision has now drawn a line through that so clients are now looking at places other than the UK, and Ireland, with English-speaking common law, is an obvious attraction. Linking in with what Senator Reilly referred to, in recent times, we have detected an increasing emphasis on quality of life, the availability of residential property, and the quality of our city regions and infrastructure. If one considers the environments from which these multinationals come, whether Shanghai, Beijing, Australia, continental Europe or the US, they are used to operating in a particular environment. They are now looking to us for guidance as to what Ireland's plans are to improve the attractiveness of all of our regions, including Dublin, over the next few years. That is what makes the Government's recent initiative with the national planning framework and Project Ireland 2040 really important for these multinationals. They know that, over the next few years, we have a vision and plans in place to expand the carrying capacity of the economy to support more foreign direct investment.