Mr. Leo Clancy:

We will take the questions as they were raised. I might ask Dr. Gibbons to comment in a second on the UK market because she will have a very good lens on small, new exporters, which tend to be a bellwether for the UK, and the sentiment among them about the UK.

Overall, 31% of exports were to the United Kingdom in 2021. That was a growth from 30% in 2020. It shows that the UK market is growing. As the Deputy rightly said, that could signal that we are further exposed than we had been the prior year to a downturn in the UK. That said, the UK is our closest neighbour and, as the Deputy knows, we have a unique trading relationship with it at what is a very difficult time for it. Also, in areas such as consumer foods, people need to eat. Many of our exports are absolutely required by the UK market. We are still not pessimistic on the UK market as a market overall.

On some of the lead indicators, we have seen and continue to see good engagement with the UK market. We had a business leaders event two weeks ago in London where there was huge engagement, including people in the audience who were planning to launch presences of various products into the UK market. It is on a very strong trajectory. Our indicators are the export levels and the market activity we are seeing. We measure the export levels once a year through our annual business review, which showed a growth in 2021, which was also a difficult year for the UK. The other sense we have of it is from engagement with our exporters. We saw very high engagement at our international markets week just at the start of October in respect of the UK. I might ask Dr. Gibbons perhaps to add something in the context of new exporters and small and medium enterprise, in particular.