Mr. John Murphy:

In recent years, significant emphasis has been placed on improving the links between the higher education institutions and industry and business in order that placements would become an integral part of many more courses. That was one of the issues which emerged at the Global Economic Forum. We spoke to people attending the latter who work in businesses and higher education institutions abroad about how the systems in other countries operate and asked how we could increase the number of placements on offer here. This would help us to address the issue to a significant degree and would avoid the necessity of putting in place a specific State-supported scheme.

I am not in a position to comment on the immigrant investor programme in the context of whether it should continue with it, scale it down or adopt a different model.