Mr. Kevin Sherry:

I thank the committee for inviting us to talk about Enterprise Ireland's work in assisting clients to respond to Brexit. Enterprise Ireland works with companies around the Republic to help them start, innovate and scale their business in international markets. Our 2020 strategy, Build Scale - Expand Reach, is specifically a Brexit strategy to help companies increase their jobs by 60,000, increase exports by €5 billion to €26 billion by 2020, increase the level of spend in Ireland by those companies by €4 billion in 2020 and help more of those companies with their global ambition to internationalise their business.

In May of last year we launched an important eurozone strategy specifically focused on increasing our clients' exports into the eurozone by 50% by 2020. As members are aware, we work with approximately 5,000 companies across our network of ten offices in Ireland and 33 offices outside of Ireland. Our focus is manufacturing and internationally traded service activities. Reflecting the strength of the economy last year, we reported record results by our clients, involving the highest level of employment in the history of the agency with 209,338 people directly employed by our client companies and the creation of over 10,309 new jobs, along with the lowest level of job losses since 1998. It is important to note that there was growth in all regions, counties and sectors in terms of that employment performance. We were delighted with that and are in the process of collecting the end-of-year export data from our client companies, which we will shortly be reporting. Although the outcome of Brexit negotiations-------