Mr. John McGrane:

That is a fair question. Good work is being done by Enterprise Ireland and other organisations in the support space, not least chambers of commerce, in connecting businesses with relevant fellow businesses, indigenously and in the opposite market. As I alluded to in my remarks, there is a counter-intuitive solution. For businesses exposed to the slump in sterling and exporting to the United Kingdom, Enterprise Ireland suggests developing other markets, but for the reasons I outlined, this is much slower than we would like. The counter-intuitive solution is to do more business in the United Kingdom. With organisations such as the chambers of commerce, we are instruments in introducing some firms to additional partner businesses on the UK side which can help them. A very simple example is a call centre. In this country we are very good at running call centres with which we service many major UK businesses. They work on a margin of 15%. The currency has slumped by 17% since 23 June which means that they are now out of the money and losing money. What will happen is that these businesses will either move to the United Kingdom which might mean moving to Newry from Dundalk in relative terms or they might be taken over by a larger business with deeper pockets in the same line of business.