Ms Linda Kane:

On the innovation side, one of the recommendations we have in our report is that the successor strategy to Innovation 2020 be published. It is due to be published in quarter 4. The council is eager to see the recommendations that will come out of that report. One of our key roles is to keep an eye on all those recommendations, which we will do in order that they will be implemented in the way they were set out in the strategy. They refer to making Ireland a global innovation leader. That was one of our previous commitments under the old strategy, so we would like to see what the proposals are for that next stage. That is incredibly important because we have seen the link in the latest CSO data, when it did the productivity in Ireland statistics for 2019, that those firms that were investing in innovation, research and development were the ones that had the highest level of productivity growth over the past ten years. It is circular. The ones that innovate are productive, but then the ones that are productive also have the capacity to invest in the innovation, so it is very hard to disentangle the causality there. They are intrinsically linked, though, so we would like to see more of the smaller firms, maybe, engage in that innovation as well so they could also benefit from-----