Mr. Pat Lardner:

Between 14,000 and 15,000 jobs are spread in 15 different counties.

In the context of employment and income levels, they are populated by a full range from graduate entry levels up to executives. From an economic contribution point of view, therefore, they are probably pretty good. One of the points I made earlier is that an interesting aspect of funds and of other internationally traded financial services is that, as a diversifier within the economy, they are pretty good because they are not correlated to domestic demand. That does not make them better or worse, it just makes them different. From an employment content point of view, we would not have seen any dip in funds over what was a very difficult period here in Ireland and other places.

On the point about where this leaves us regarding competition, we are very enmeshed not only with the UK but also with Europe. An Irish-domiciled fund is sold in 70 countries around the world. By the last count I had, probably less than 1% of the assets in all of those €2 trillion worth of domiciled funds are assets invested in Ireland. It is not, therefore, an industry that was specifically created to invest in Ireland, although, in fairness, in recent weeks, the European Investment Bank came to Dublin to talk about the way it deploys money into things like the real economy, be it infrastructure, property or private equity, in order to try to encourage investment in Irish SMEs and Irish projects as part of the development of industry broadly here.