Ms Patricia Callan:

It is very important that our agencies are properly resourced and have the skills base but from where we sit, most of our members are not clients of any of those agencies and that is the point we have been trying to make. That is not to say that they are not exporting. I have companies that have 12 people and are in 60 markets but have never been near Enterprise Ireland. In terms of our focus and approach to these things, the Department tends to view them through the lens of the agencies. What we are really trying to say is that there is a much bigger cohort of businesses out there that we need to look at if we are designing supports. We certainly need expertise, knowledge and practical assistance on the ground. Enterprise Ireland was very quick off the mark in terms of producing a lot of information and touching base with our clients. However, in terms of rethinking entire business plans, we need to get into really high-level stuff.

The time for getting the basic information and so on is over. We now need strategic high-level interventions. We get the most positive feedback from our people abroad who are outstanding on the ground in creating those business links but, equally, I have found in recent years that the embassies here are also very good at doing that. We could be more creative in not just relying on our agencies but figuring out how we could engage those people better to work on our behalf and create joint business propositions in their countries. That might be an option also.

In terms of the comments about the joint labour committees, JLCs, it is part of my submission around cost competitiveness. Going back to the point about eight years of recession, my biggest concern when the recession hit was that there was a lot of fat, so to speak. Businesses were able to cut costs. They renegotiated their energy costs, input costs and so on. The point about smaller companies is that they are price takers, and labour costs ended up being one of the few areas under people's control so what did we see? We saw people lose their jobs, redundancies and people put on short time because wages were simply uncompetitive. As we got into the recession we saw that industries that had the flexibility negotiated voluntary decreases to allow people stay in their jobs. We need that level of flexibility. The problem with measures like the joint labour committees, which is my fundamental question, is that they existed when we had no labour law. We now have 40 labour law measures and whether someone employs one or 4,000 people, they still need to know them all. Equally, we have a National Minimum Wage Act. If we have a national minimum wage across the board, why do we need these additional agreements on top of that?