Mr. Seamus Coffey:

There is no doubt that the dependence on multinationals is significant, but in mitigating the risk, it is better to have the employment and investment and collect tax revenue. It would be more difficult to develop an indigenous sector without the foreign multinational sector. For the first 40 or 50 years following the foundation of the State, we tried to develop the indigenous sector by cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world and it proved to be an utter failure. In the past few decades we have witnessed the ability to turn the economy around by attracting investment from abroad. The investment has been successful, but perhaps some of the benefits for the indigenous sector envisaged have not materialised. There were hopes companies would form clusters and that Irish companies would begin to co-operate with larger foreign companies before breaking out on their own. We have not seen that happen, but we have seen the continued arrival of US companies with the benefits it brings. On developing the indigenous sector on an ongoing basis, it is not an either-or choice. We have been relatively unsuccessful in developing world leaders in comparison to other countries. Our companies may be dwarfed on a global level by the presence of US companies such as Apple and Google which originated in a huge market and presence of which here has a global reach that most countries do not have.