Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 13 July 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Unified Patent Court: Discussion

Mr. Naoise Gaffney:

The corporate IP group in IBEC represents companies that have significant IP activity in Ireland. There is a lot of IP management activity in Ireland. All of us in the group essentially live and breathe the management of IP every day. We work for a mix of multinational and native enterprises. We essentially put ourselves forward as the people who do this at the grassroots. We have a ground-level perspective. The message that we are trying to provide is that the calculation is essentially based on the gravitational, knock-on effect that an active court would have. We are talking about attracting additional functions into the country through foreign direct investment. At the same time, we want to upskill the workforce more generally. That will have an osmotic effect in benefiting our SMEs, which will become more sophisticated in this area as a result. The calculation is an indication of the wider economic growth that would occur if we established a reputation as one of the top three or four hotspots for IP activity in Europe. When I talk about this, I always talk about the old Kevin Costner film, "Field of Dreams". The famous line from that is, "If you build it, they will come." That is how we see it working in this context.

Does Mr. Sweeney want to add anything about technical details and calculations?