Mr. Naoise Gaffney:

In our report in the fourth quarter of last year we placed a separate figure on the value to the legal services industry, which we did not put in our opening statement because I had the unenviable task of trying to keep it to eight minutes. That report was a 50-page document. My colleague, Mr. Sweeney, can go into the figures in more detail, but the value is in the order of €100 million or €200 million, depending on the level of activity. In my answer to some of Deputy Stanton's questions I said that the large figures we place on what it would mean for Ireland if we have a successful local division here have very much to do with the gravitational effect on the onboarding of additional corporate activity. Typically speaking, from a multinational perspective, which I will deal with first, when it comes to locating certain parts and functions of an entity in different locations, there is a tendency to keep certain functions close to the nerve centre. Even if a body's headquarters are in one country, sometimes there might be a cluster of significant individuals - not necessarily the key people but significant individuals all the same - in some other jurisdiction. Some of the last functions to depart that nerve centre are on the corporate side. IP management is one such function. If, however, a decision is made to relocate IP management activities, it tends typically to bring a lot of other corporate activities along with it. It is therefore not just IP managers one sees coming into the country as the result of a gravitational effect; there is an ancillary pull on a lot of other activities as well. One may therefore find a lot of that nerve centre, not just the IP element, moving to Ireland.

A really good point was made about this opportunity being to a large extent potentially more valuable to Ireland after Brexit. The UK made a significant contribution to the design of this system back in the day, before Brexit was even on the horizon. As a result, going back to Mr. Sweeney's point earlier, the UPC was designed very much as a nice hybrid of the Commonwealth traditions of the English-speaking world and the civil law traditions of France and Germany and the countries clustered around them. Ireland now has this opportunity to step into Britain's shoes. I was on a panel at a meeting in London on intellectual property in the first quarter of this year at which I made that point and then went on to tell the audience that, of course, Ireland is not the UK and that we have been trying to make that point for about 800 years. At the same time, there is now an opportunity for Ireland to step up and to play in the top tier and, going back to Mr. Sweeney's point, to contribute to the overall betterment of the system in a way we may not see if we step back, are passive about this and allow the system to proceed in such a way that, essentially, it just becomes a clone of the German system; that is, I think, the way German practitioners would like it because that is the system with which they are most familiar.