Mr. Leo Clancy:

First of all, I thank the Deputy for his very kind words. I am doing my best to follow a very hard act in Ms. Julie Sinnamon so I really appreciate that.

I will take the Deputy's questions, as raised, and ask my colleague, Dr. Gibbons, to cover the town centre regional hubs in a minute because we have done an immense amount of work in that space. I will cover the circular economy first. I met only yesterday with a company that is looking at transitioning some of its packaging to a circular economy approach to be ready for a demand it sees coming for the future. There is, therefore, certainly much activity happening on the ground. There is activity happening in certain university settings as well. University College Dublin, UCD, has a very strong focus in this space. We are supporting that also through a lot of our regional funds. Wherever there is a focus on environment, there is a focus on circular economy as well as the more carbon-intensive aspects of the circular economy. It is, therefore, certainly something that is on the minds of companies and continues to be on our minds also.

The Deputy asked about high-potential start-ups versus standard start-ups. We are seeing success across the board. We might look at some of our companies that have been clients for longer, for instance, Kirby Group Engineering. One of the first announcements I was present at last June in Limerick was about that company growing 300 jobs. That company had been in the electrical sector in Ireland for many years and has actually found a really good export market in high-value construction. It has grown very nicely and we are seeing quite a bit of that.

We are seeing high-potential start-ups grow also. The Deputy will have seen the announcement of a number of unicorns in recent months, many of which are our clients. I cannot quite remember if Wayflyer is our fourth or fifth unicorn in a short period of time but companies like Wayflyer and Flipdish are achieving global scale. For people's benefit, a unicorn is a company that is valued at more than €1 billion. We now have four or five; I am just not quite sure of the number. We expect to see more.

Our strategy is geared towards creating more and helping companies grow in scale while remaining Irish through that. We are still seeing a trend of our leading companies being sold to multinational companies. That is incredibly positive for the companies involved and mostly for the employees. What tends to happen in our experience is that those companies continue to grow. Irish companies by their nature are very innovative so they become very innovate parts of those companies that acquire them. The activity generally stays in Ireland. That said, we would like to see more public limited companies, plcs, out of Ireland. We would like to see more companies growing.

We had wonderful results this morning from Kerry Group, one of our proudest Irish independent plcs. Our ambition for Irish enterprise is that we will see more companies like Kerry Group in the coming years that can be leaders in their fields and remain proudly Irish. In the context of where the global economy is and the increasing drive towards digitalisation, it is also entirely possible that a person can start a company now out of Ireland that can become fully global. It is very positive.

Before I come back to the Deputy's question on town centres, I might move straight to the linkages with multinational companies. That is an area that is strengthening all the time. I have had a number of engagements IDA Ireland. For the benefit of members, I come from IDA Ireland. I worked with IDA Ireland until last May. We have very deep linkages across the board. Multinational companies are increasingly helping Irish companies to grow on the global stage. If I pick companies like Stripe, Amazon and Microsoft, they are very vocally and practically supporting companies to embrace, for instance, digital technologies and online sale, complementing some of the things about which Mr. McElwee spoke earlier in terms of trading online. That is a really positive linkage and it is growing. Introductions to companies are still something we do in the context of the trade missions the Deputy mentioned. We continue to focus on that.

With that, I will hand back to Dr. Gibbons to speak a little bit about our focus on town centres, remote working and remote hubs.