Mr. Niall Burgess:

We do not have any capital assets in Ireland, they are all held abroad. The figure is 167 properties in total, of which in the region of 35 are owned by the State.

We have been asked to increase our footprint by 25 or 26 new missions by 2025. That is set out in the Global Ireland programme. Broadly speaking, the idea is to double Ireland's global influence in the period up to 2025. Stepping onto the UN Security Council was one very immediate measure of how we are trying to do that. Essentially, we are trying to increase Ireland's influence on outcomes that matter to this country and to our citizens. By the end of this year, we will have opened 14 new missions. We have already opened 11 missions this year to date. Last month we opened a new embassy in Kiev and next month we will open a new mission, a consulate, in Manchester. In the autumn we will open new embassies in Morocco and the Philippines. The new embassies are one measure of that. We have also scaled up several of our existing embassies. For example, our embassy in London has significant new resources not only from the Department of Foreign Affairs but from across the Government. Our properties essentially provide the platform for a whole-of-government presence. We scaled up our presence in Berlin, in Paris, in several EU missions, in China, Tokyo, in the US and Washington and in the UN. There is another dimension to the scaling-up which is less visible. In that context, we expect that we will open in the region of another 12 missions over the course of the next four years, at about three a year, but the decisions on where those will be have not yet been taken. That is a matter for the Government.