Mr. Aidan O'Kane:

I am very pleased that Deputy Smith mentioned about the recognition of the partnership and how it seems to be all joined up, and that is absolutely the case. We see engagements between our business community with LYIT, for example, in the development of fintech-related courses, which is helping build out that higher level pipeline of skills, which many of fintech, insure-tech and regtech companies are crying out for.

Skills is the number one item on our agenda in terms of concern about sustainability of our business and future investment, but we are very joined up. We see indigenous companies such as Alchemy and FinTrU leveraging the university and college to build out bespoke courses to fulfil their needs in terms of creation of that talent pipeline. That is working very successfully.

With regard to the skills shortages in the north west, fintech is a growing cluster. A centre of gravity is certainly forming in the north west between the likes of Allstate, Alchemy, FinTrU, Tata Consultancy Services and Optum. There is a groundswell there and a demand for those skills going into the future. I know, looking into the future, the skills around big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation and robotics will all be essential skills to sustain future businesses. The roles that do not exist today but will exist in ten to 15 years' time are the ones we need to be developing and thinking about now.

Senator McGreehan mentioned the tax issue on a European basis and I thought it was quite interesting to take a look at some other countries around Europe. For example, the tolerance threshold agreements between Germany, Belgium and France were for in or around 19 days going up to a maximum of 34 days for border countries without triggering any tax obligations. That has changed as a result of Covid and all of those countries have substantially increased the number of days working, which demonstrates that, despite taxing rights and obligations under EU and OECD models, there is an appetite to permit higher thresholds. The current Irish legislation allows for zero. That is the reality.