Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for being here today and for their statements. My first question is for IBEC. When we look at the EU, we see that we are in the class of a strong innovator, but we are not innovation leaders like countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands and Sweden. In one sense the European scorecard belies what is happening underneath and is something we need to be cautious of. While we show 118% of the EU average, that is becoming smaller as well. We have to look in terms of global innovation. On the global innovation index, we have drifted from 12th to 19th and on the International Institute of Management Development world competitiveness indicator, we have drifted from seventh to 13th. This is all despite the fact that the private sector contributes the second highest amount of research and development spending in the OECD. There is a lot going on underneath the bonnet here. The long-term economic forecasting tells us that China, India and the US are going to be positioned at the top of the field in 30 years and the EU is not going to be. What do we need to do? How concerned should we be about those trends? What do we need to improve our performance outside of what has been said today? What do we need to do to ensure our competitiveness and ensure we are driving forward for the future?