Mr. Mark Christal:

I have some comments on the points raised by Deputy Rabbitte. With regard to the co-ordination of the LEOs, significant effort goes into ensuring shared learning across the local enterprise offices. Enterprise Ireland has a dedicated team based in our Shannon office, which we call the LEO centre of excellence. The team's job is to work with Ms Martin and the respective LEO managers, and to bring the 31 LEO heads together, to share information and best practice. We are very much supported by the local authorities in that agenda. We also have a national steering group, of which Ms Delaney and I are members. This group shares ideas and best practice at a policy level.

On the issue of property, and hopefully I will not repeat some of the points I raised earlier, we work with IDA Ireland to collaborate as best we can around property needs. The development of second sites is a key objective for Enterprise Ireland. Second sites is when Enterprise Ireland companies are growing or expanding and we work with them to identify sites. If they are based in Dublin or Cork, for example, we see if they would consider expanding their business into a rural location as opposed to expanding in their current location.

We have some really good examples of that including Abtran last year, as well as Carne. They are really good companies which have developed second sites in regional locations and brought a lot to those regions. The regional enterprise development fund, REDF, covers the 42 projects we funded. Many of those projects were to develop existing facilities. It did not focus on new builds or new entities. It was to see what exists in rural locations and what we can do through the fund and the partners involved in those projects to develop those facilities in those locations.