Mr. John McGrane:

Certainly. I thank the Deputy for the question. The reality is we have done extraordinarily well, going back to the 1960s, T.K. Whitaker and various political representatives at the time, who had the vision, at a time we were exporting our young on the hoof alongside our cattle, to look upwards and outwards and say we should not stand for this. What did we do? We developed a national strategy that leveraged our availability of, frankly, cheap labour at that time because people were emigrating otherwise, along with our ability to give tax breaks. We developed a foreign direct investment, FDI, strategy that was almost immediately successful. People will remember the Shannon free development zone, etc. We have become the envy of the world for having that strategy. IDA Ireland, and its officials, is a superb, globally acknowledged agency, as are the departmental processes that support all of that. That is simply by way of saying this is not a mystery. We know what happens if we take a business strategy, invest in it, give it the resources at State and private sector level, and go out and get the best businesses in the world to come in to employ people. Of course, it has gone from being a cheap labour strategy to one of high-tech and high intelligence. It underpinned the development of our universities and research centres, which are also now in a world-class state as a result. It is self-propelling and almost exponentially successful strategy for the State and our people.

We do not do that for our native businesses. Enterprise Ireland also does a good job to help exporting companies build their export markets to Great Britain and beyond and to enable non-exporters to become exporters. That is fine too, but all of the above need local services, including the grocery sector, the people who take care of cars at the top of the town, the people who run a local hotel and the people who provide professional service at local level, without which communities, and FDI and exporting companies, could not function. We had the opportunity to think about this but never did. The foregoing examples of EI and IDA Ireland strategies show us exactly what an agency that could take care of our local, home-grown firms, which provide those goods and services locally, could achieve.

As a proud citizen of Ireland, I am shocked and deeply irritated when the OECD states that Irish SMEs have the lowest productivity in Europe. I have gone to considerable lengths, with my colleagues, to get to the root of that. Nobody can tell me exactly what the example of that is. We get compared with the German Mittelstand, and we admire all that it does, but it is not a fair comparison. Enterprise Ireland, which has a new chief executive, Leo Clancy, has equally positive views on this area and will point to things such as technology usage and innovation.

These are good things but not at the expense of jobs. We simply need to stand back and take a strategic view of what natural competences locally are and what the heart of community locally is. Colleagues who are here today will attest to the beating heart of local towns up and down the country. These local firms buy local, hire local and support local - much more than foreign direct investment is in a position to do in terms of getting sponsorship cheques for the local football team or school - and, of course, they vote local. Those indigenous firms are doing that completely on their own. I will give an example beyond present company, which is well able to illustrate. Waste disposal used to be collecting rubbish. It is now a green transition industry. You have some of the world's best what used to be called rubbish collectors turning waste to energy and being a significant contributor to our climate goals. Those firms are typically home-grown and family-owned. They might have had one truck 30 or 40 years and now have a national fleet in one form or another. They are not exporting companies or foreign direct investment. They are too big to avail of the supports that are welcome from the LEOs and they are on their own. They are not asking for anything but it does strike us as a missed opportunity to ask whether we could support and develop more of those, not least in the energy and climate space. We are not looking for handouts. We are looking for the missing State strategy here that can deliver far more for our economy but for our communities most of all.