Mr. Leo Clancy:

It is front and centre of our Enterprise Ireland strategy, at least. We have included sustainability as the fourth of five pillars in our strategy. Every time we survey our clients, we survey them on sustainability. The Deputy asked earlier about the level of sentiment towards sustainability but we did not have time to answer his question. We surveyed clients on the way into our recent International Markets Week event and learned that 74% of companies feel sustainability is a high priority for them. As the Deputy said, that is still not enough, and as I said to the audience gathered on the day, it is still not enough and we need 100% of companies to understand that if they do not show up sustainably in their global markets, they will be locked out of them in years to come. I agree with the Deputy on that.

All our direct productivity supports have been very helpful in allowing companies to consider new ways to make their process more sustainable. We are seeing an increasing flow of research and development, and innovation projects, from companies. In this regard, I refer to supporting them in innovating the next wave of products more amenable to the circular economy. I recently met a company in regional Ireland that is experiencing the challenge of having to prove its products will be 100% sustainable, recyclable and amenable to circular-economy principles within a very small number of years. Our response to it was to ask it how we could help it to innovate the product through research and the process innovation that is needed.

We launched a significant suite of decarbonisation assistance measures for companies in June. There is significant interest in these, and it is building. To date this year, we have supported 118 companies with decarbonisation or climate-action initiatives of one kind or another. The two are linked. I hear the Deputy's point clearly on the sustainable circular economy as distinct from sustainability in the carbon-reduction sense but we feel companies are becoming more alert to this. There is a long way to go but sustainability is at the heart of our strategy.