Ms Olivia Buckley:

I will deal with the question of whether Irish companies are Brexit-ready and what is happening on that particular front. There are a number of angles to this. A lot of work is going on in terms of the feedback from our membership. There has been a huge amount of Brexit briefings and advisory work.

Companies are seeking advice on what sort of plans they need to be make for customs union arrangements, what this implies and what it costs. Much of the research has been done in the vacuum of not knowing the final details but our companies and their advisers are certainly very focused on it. We will be in London next week to meet our sister institute, the Chartered Institute of Taxation, CIOT, along with its Belfast members. We had meetings in Belfast and Dublin earlier in the summer. There is no doubt that the focus is on the mechanics, namely, on what may happen and how.

The broader issue of whether companies are Brexit-ready goes back perhaps to our export strategy. A number of worrying statistics came out in the past couple of months. When we conducted our research into behaviour and attitudes, we looked at export-prone companies, that is, companies in export-driven sectors. There are three worrying statistics here. Most companies are still focused on the domestic market as their real priority. Over half of the companies we looked at were exporting to the UK. However, those that are not already doing so do not, for obvious reasons relating to Brexit, see huge potential to do so in the next 18 months. Fewer than half are exporting beyond the UK market and do not see themselves doing so in the next 18 months. There is an underlying cautiousness, fear and lack of confidence, a sense of constrained circumstances - whether they involve finance, capacity or sales staff - and a sense of an inability to enter export markets in the eurozone in particular. We know that the eurozone has been prioritised by Enterprise Ireland as one of the areas in which we can really take advantage. The Tánaiste and Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation is also looking at Europe's free trade agreements with countries such as Japan and Canada to see what advantage we can take from these. There is, however, an underlying sense of worry.

Diversification is the real answer to Brexit. Quite apart from dealing with the mechanics of Brexit, I am not so sure that we are Brexit-ready when it comes to diversification to markets in other countries. The chief executive of Enterprise Ireland spoke on "Morning Ireland" recently from the latter's showcase event. I do not have the statistics from the Enterprise Ireland survey to hand, but one of the areas she highlighted was the research showing that companies were not as Brexit-ready as they might like in the broader terms of looking at the world. Our export figures show that most of our exports in both services and goods, that is, approximately 85% to 90%, are carried out by multinational companies. This means that only 10% of our overall exports are driven by the indigenous sector. We do not have the same level of statistics for services, but looking at goods and products we can see that we have some really good superstars, companies that have conquered the world, and we are very proud of them. However, only 11% of them are exporting more than 20 products to more than 20 countries and they account for almost 50% of the value. The fact that our indigenous sector is reduced down to 10%, with 11% of those accounting for 50% of our exports, shows how limited we really are. The median number of countries our companies export to is actually five and the median number of products exported is four. Nine out of ten products exported by our indigenous companies are food products and one of these - chilled boned beef - accounts for 23% of our exports.

Ms O'Brien has already dealt with the area of innovation, diversification and research and development, which has flatlined in small companies. Very small and medium-sized companies consider themselves to be innovation-active. We have a great deal going for us but we also have much work to do. No stone must be left unturned.

In the context of our tax policies as supported by our tax administration system - which will Ms O'Brien might want to expand upon - if the members wish to be Brexit-proofed as policymakers, they will have to look at every line of possibility in terms of what we can do for SMEs and how we might - with the relevant policies in place to support this - transform Ireland into a really ambitious country.