Mr. John McCarthy:

They are very good questions. On the first question from Deputy Lowry; this is a conference, unlike others, where we had an equivalent annual conference in Washington which has been going on for 100 years. This is a biannual conference and has only been going on for the guts of perhaps 20 years or less, as the Deputy has mentioned. The one thing I see from the conference, particularly as it has become more and more multi-modal, is the increasing role of technology, not just about the infrastructure itself but the use of that infrastructure in different ways which may not have been thought of before. The focus is, in particular, on the use of technologies and how that can span across all of the different transport modes. It is an area where it is hard to deal with matters in isolation. With one mode or another, one really only gets the full benefit if one takes them all together and has a dialogue bringing all that together.

The conference influences thinking and obviously influences research and future directions there, as Dr. McNally might say. Thinking in this area is heavily supported by the Commission in the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, the research arm of the Commission, but also the transport arm of the Commission, DG MOVE. They take away the thinking from the conference. Various member states and countries participate.

Even the International Transport Forum, ITF, takes away what happens at the conference as part of its ongoing thought process about how things are shaped in the future.

On the point about trade, there is strong support from Enterprise Ireland and IDA for the conference. We see the conference as a great opportunity to bring participants in the transport area in Ireland to the fore and allow them to show their strengths in what they do.