Mr. Shane Enright:

The next slide shows the growth in investment, which tends to be very volatile on a quarterly basis. We have tried to break it down into its components. The key explanation for the volatility is aircraft. Aircraft imports in the Irish context tend to be large and to fluctuate wildly. There were few aircraft imported in the first two quarters of this year, which depressed aggregate investment, but when one excludes this one can see an underlying recovery. Building and construction activity has begun to show some kind of consistent return to year-on-year growth, and the grey bar represents machinery and equipment, which excludes aircraft. This represents everything physical that businesses need to operate. The return to growth in both of those components of investment is encouraging on the employment side, which we will turn to a little later, but also in terms of the productive capacity of the economy over the medium term.

The final slide on the domestic side illustrates the tourism story. From January to August 2013, we had a 7% year-on-year growth in visitors to Ireland. That surprised everyone involved. It has been broad-based across a number of destinations, but the number of visitors from North America in particular is up quite a bit. My colleague Mr. John McCarthy will now discuss our outlook for this year and 2014.