Mr. Martin Gallagher:

Senator Crown asked about manufacturing sites in Ireland. There are at least five strong generic companies employing approximately 3,000 people in Ireland. My colleague Mr. Michael Cullen alluded to certain companies which are not to the forefront, such as Athlone. There are also other generic manufacturers outside of the membership of the APMI. However, the development of generics is done on a pan-European basis. Most of the products are developed through central processing and licensing, with the result that many companies are part-manufacturing products or are campaigning products. One of the issues for my own company in the past was that we had 28% downtime because of the number of products we were manufacturing. That is primarily why many of the traditional companies, some of which were family firms, have been absorbed into larger organisations.

In regard to the marking of pharma products, there is no difficulty with including similar packaging to that of the originator, but it should be borne in mind that often there are patents on tablet shape and colour. This is why one is more likely to see white tablets.