Mr. Leo Clancy:

I would echo that. We have worked with many enterprise offices in latter part of last year to ensure that companies with more than ten employees can continue to be supported, where appropriate, by the local enterprise office. That has been an agenda item for quite some time for politicians. We are keen to see it supported.

I will address the Senator's question on the UK trading relationship. I am conscious of the time. We have deployed a huge amount of support in preparation for Brexit. The Senator will know that the key dates have shifted at various times. As a result, we have seen a number of false dawns. That said, we have run programmes like clear customs financial support and supported the ready for customs grant scheme. We have supported more than 1,000 positions within Irish enterprise that are focused on Brexit readiness. We have certainly put a huge amount of effort in.

We are seeing some risk into the UK market. The Senator specifically mentioned other jurisdictions and potential trading displacements. What we have been seeing in recent months with the resurgence of the global economy is that countries such as New Zealand and Australia are actually seeing more access to more markets in their own locations. New Zealand in particular is looking potentially at further unfettered access to China in the coming period. We are also seeing that markets in those locales are opening up. It is a balanced picture in terms of the global economy.

Ireland is still the closest trading partner of the United Kingdom and will certainly be a key player. What we are hearing from our clients is that they have made themselves ready generally. There are still concerns about the way things may go depending on the final shape of agreements but we think that industry is generally in a pretty good shape. There will always be uncertainty until there is a final agreement but we are actually hearing a lot of optimism about the market for the future. Some of those global forces that were there in the past are abating a little bit as a consequence of some of the inflation and resurgence of economies around the world.