Professor Peter Clinch:

We can modestly say that one of the achievements the council has had is to flag up exactly what the Deputy has mentioned. We could have sat there thinking we look great when the numbers came out on our overall productivity level. We are right up the top of the class in how good our performance is on labour productivity particularly. To be fair to the Department of the Taoiseach and the Department of Finance, they were very supportive of us when we argued strongly to encourage the Central Statistics Office, CSO, to produce more detailed data that would allow us strip out multinationals. It is not just multinationals however, we should say leading companies because for example, in the food sector and in pharma we have large, successful companies so it is not quite as simple as foreign versus domestic. Let us say it is close to that but we give credit to some of the Irish companies. We have stripped that out so that we can look at the figures on productivity and I will give the Deputy a couple of those. Labour productivity in foreign dominated sectors grew by almost 140% between 2000 and 2014. That is a 6.5% annual figure but when we look at the domestic and other sectors, it saw an increase in productivity of just 50% over the same period. That is 140% compared to 50%. What is even more disturbing now is that we are seeing declining or stagnant productivity in most of the non-leading companies. As I said, what is seen is essentially 90% of our productivity performance driven by 10% of the firms. We have the data to show the issue. The question is how do we start to address that problem.