Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 19 September 2013

Public Accounts Committee

Annual Report and Accounts 2012: Discussion with IDA Ireland

12:00 pm

Mr. Barry O'Leary:

We have had somebody working on a part-time basis in Australia for a number of years, but from January we will be putting a formal presence into the Australian market. We visit a number of markets. People have been to Malaysia, to Israel and South Africa on one-off programmes and we work closely with Enterprise Ireland as well. We are co-located in a number of places around the world but we are not in some places due to different business reasons.

Anyway, I suppose there are a certain number of initial countries that we are putting effort into now and we cannot spread too thinly. There is a company going into Cavan from Indonesia, or perhaps I am mixing it up with Thailand. Anyway, there are individual projects that we deal with. It is something to keep under review, but I emphasise that we are rather stretched where we are at the moment and we would have a few priorities ahead of that.