Mr. Martin Shanahan:

We will continue to work with it on the availability of its lands. I would say it is a very good working relationship. At the moment, I do not see that disadvantage.

In respect of the approach to regional development, the Deputy described a situation where a large urban centre attracts the investment. I am speaking from a foreign direct investment and IDA perspective. Enterprise Ireland has quite a different profile in that it is more regionally spread because it is bottom-up and concerns indigenous companies. That is and will continue to be an issue in respect of foreign direct investment. We have made huge strides in trying to achieve regional balance but it is a factor that the trend in foreign direct investment is for companies to increasingly make decisions to locate in large urban areas. That is the international trend, which we are trying to buck.

We have only one city of over one million people. Ireland is winning about three and a half times the amount of foreign direct investment that one might ordinarily expect if one went on the basis of our percentage GDP of the 28 EU member states so we are getting a lot of it and that is filtering out to all regions. We need to bear in mind that this is international competition. There are approximately 190 cities in China with over one million people. There are 36 cities in Europe with over one million people. There are about 50 metropolitan areas in the US which have over one million people. We are trying to market Ireland which, on the whole, has four million people and one city of international scale, which is Dublin. Our approach is then to market regions. For the most part, the regions have about half a million people on average and some of them have far fewer. That is to put it in context. Large urban centres are likely to continue being hubs and attractors of foreign direct investment. Obviously, we will make every effort to disperse further than that but they are our best attractor in the first instance from which we build out.