Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This budget allows our staff to co-ordinate the expenditure from other Departments. Bord Bia and Enterprise Ireland, for example, have quite a lot of funding here and I would not like to suggest that we are not spending more money promoting Ireland through our embassy networks. We are doing that and we have just had comfortably the largest ever St. Patrick's Day programme, with 56 countries visited in total. Each Minister's Department pays for its travel programme. This subhead funds our team to co-ordinate things and there is a lot more joined-up thinking in the area of promoting Ireland. There are new Ireland Houses not just in Tokyo but in many other parts of the world.