Mr. Richard Murphy:

We will be retaining the experience. Our focus will be on not throwing out the good things. Many excellent things have been happening, for example, the secondary school entrepreneurship programme. We would like to see that moved back to primary schools and to build on the work of transition year programmes in secondary schools.

The plan is that Enterprise Ireland will retain, enhance and continue to develop the capability of the county enterprise board staff as they move into the local authority. They will be invited and encouraged to attend Enterprise Ireland training courses on subjects such as finance, strategy and marketing. We will be working on export awareness development and on driving core skills in that area in the county enterprise boards. How to do, how to tell and how to teach will be a core mission for ourselves.

While people may see artificial borders or barriers between Enterprise Ireland and county enterprise boards, they do not exist from a client perspective. Current county enterprise board exporting companies have full access to Enterprise Ireland 's offices and services overseas. We do not get into who owns whom. If the client is capable of exporting, he or she is invited into the Enterprise Ireland international service network.

I hear people say the focus may shift from micro to export. The key word for us is "potential". We want to build on people's potential to export. We will help them to shape things such as value proposition and to become leaner. We can bring the Enterprise Ireland lean engineering stuff down into small companies to develop them and encourage them to look at cost initiatives. We would also like to see the seeding of new micro sectors so that games, for example, can come into a national perspective. We want to start promoting companies in the Enterprise Ireland body of companies.

We recognise there is work to be done in making our web page simpler, more stripped down and easier to access. This needs to be done in association with entrepreneurs rather than with people in our area. We would like to have the page logic tested so that people can understand it, work their way through it and point out difficulties so that the whole thing becomes simpler and easier to use.