Mr. John Whelan:

I will respond to Deputy Conaghan's comments. Our food industry has tended to export most of its product to the UK. They have had difficulties going across mainland Europe and into Asia. Targets have been set under the trade and investment strategy, Towards 2015. Bord Bia has been moving well in meeting them. We are getting more companies into mainland Europe. We are getting good traction in terms of our food exports into China. The exports are coming from a low base and it will be a slow process. My colleague, Mr. Coyle, may wish to comment further on that.

With regard to the X factor, we have been having some strong success from indigenous service companies in the past few years. Our software services companies have been doing extremely well and the cross-over between services and manufacturing, particularly in clean tech-green tech which has been very successful. We have seen growth levels of 20% from a wide range of these companies.

These are small companies at the early stages that will need more financing, as we have indicated earlier, and they will need to have the doors opened for them through trade missions and so on, if they are to grow further. They need a more stable eurozone. When people get a bit more confidence, they will be happy to spend money. At the moment nobody is happy to spend money. That is holding us back. There has been some very good growth.

The food industry will have the X factor for the next decade. World demand is just rocketing. The second X factor on the export front will be clean tech-green tech, with the services overlapping.