Mr. Seamus Mulconry:

A point was made about Dublin being the shared services capital of Europe, which ties in to a broader policy question. Among the industries we attract into Ireland, we can attract them into specific locations. When Accenture set up its shared services centre in Dublin, it was told it would need to set up the centre between the canals and that if it tried to do it on a site outside the main centre of town, it would not be able to do it because it could not recruit the right people for it. If one is now doing something in the digital space, one is also going for Dublin's inner city.

Technically, everybody says that, with modern technology, you can run a business from anywhere. Guess what? You cannot. Most of these businesses run on people and the people need to be in a central location. If one wants to recruit for the high-tech sector, it will be recruiting people those who are in the city centre and down on the digital alley. The beauty of social enterprises is that they tend to be small local businesses dealing with local needs, so they can be encouraged anywhere throughout the country. There is a real problem for policymakers at the moment. If one goes down the high street of any medium-sized town in Ireland, one will see shops closing like there was no tomorrow. A lot of that business is migrating to very large supermarkets. What happens to those towns? What are people going to do if there are not small local businesses? There really is an onus on policymakers to start thinking how we can replace with other enterprises some of those small local businesses and shops which are not going to survive. I believe social enterprise can play a role. It is particularly of interest to me because I come from that small shopkeeping background and I can see that the kind of business I grew up in no longer exists.

Mr. Coughlan may want to handle the European question.