Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The reality is that Galway has high visibility, with a chamber of commerce and so on. Politicians are often lobbied by chambers of commerce, for example, the Westport or American chambers of commerce. They are organised. I will name a company, which will not mind because it is blue-ribboned in every way. The manufacturing firm, McHale, is local and creative, operates in a competitive market and has a foreign branch. It is counter-intuitive in every way, from its inception to the position it has since reached. It is competitive and effective because the guy who owns it comes from where it is located. We have a great deal of that.

Nobody ever figures out that there are some massively successful, internationally competitive companies in the strangest of places, sometimes because the people running them are in those places by chance. These companies are able to compete in locations in which people say that they should not be able to. They do however, partly because they often have loyal workforces which one might not get in a city. If we could get a list, or even a sample list, of 70, 80, 90 or 100 of these companies in some way that would not involve spending oodles of money, we would be able to tell people that this is the real west of Ireland. It is creative, dynamic and competitive. It does not lie down just because it is a little bit further away by road. I know some of these companies. I find them on back roads all over the place. It would be useful for us to know exactly how many of those are around the place because they give a lie to the spatial planning idea that if something is not in a growing city it will not happen.