Mr. John McCarthy:

That is a good question. We have trawled through the company accounts of many of the pharmaceutical firms in Ireland because it is such an important issue as the Deputy mentioned. Our view is that the blockbuster drugs that are losing patent protection this year and next have much lower global sales than the blockbuster drugs that lost patent protection in 2012 and 2013. Very few of those are actually manufactured in Ireland. Our best educated guess is the impact of this shift from branded drug production to generic drug production because of patent expiry is probably behind us. I cannot say that definitively because that would involve a firm-specific, micro-level analysis but that would be the best view. If one looks at trade data for the first half of the year - division 5 in terms of the SITC classification - there is an increase in the exports from the broad pharma-chem sector. We are confident but one can never be sure.