Mr. Gerard Brady:

We see similar schemes to SARP across about 25 EU countries, which are competitive for highly mobile workers. From our point of view, so long as other countries have similar schemes in place, most of which are probably more generous than SARP, then Ireland needs to compete with those schemes. If one were to see a change in SARP or similar schemes one would prefer to see it done at an OECD level through some kind of agreement on the use of those schemes, so that every country is moving together. The danger from an Irish perspective is that SARP works very well at attracting people into the country, but it is a competitive process with other countries. Were one country to drop its SARP or equivalent it will obviously lose people to other countries offering better inducements. Our view is that one cannot move unilaterally to change or remove SARP. However, I do not think anyone would oppose a multilateral agreement across all countries using similar schemes.