Mr. Jonathan O'Hara:

There are at least three topics I can answer on. I will try to take them in sequence. The first was regulatory co-operation. I take the Deputy's point. He is right that much of that competence is at EU level as opposed to Irish Government level, but Ireland has a particular interest in getting more regulatory co-operation on life sciences and the pharmaceutical sector. I take the point about where the competence lies, but there might be an incentive behind Ireland pushing the EU a little further, especially in the direction of pharmaceuticals and life sciences.

There are many regulatory issues out there and insofar as we can push everything forward a little bit on the life sciences, that might be beneficial.

Second, the Deputy also referred to the procurement maze and that is probably a good way to describe it. There may be some options there where the Government, probably through a trade commissioner or some such role, could start to look at where all those opportunities are to help some of the companies understand the maze and the big picture as to where the places are that they might look for these opportunities. Going very far down the road, it might be some kind of register of opportunities which might be of interest to Irish life sciences companies. The company could come to the Government, and it would assemble that register once, as opposed to having 50 different companies doing it themselves. That might very much facilitate Irish companies, given the opportunities there for such companies.

The third point raised by the Deputy was on management services. This is indeed something of a vague description and I did have had to reacquaint myself with some of the details so I will try to give him a little more of that detail. Some of the ways to do that may be to describe what it is not. This is not financial services or information technology, IT, services and is more things like project management services, business consulting services and executive counselling. Those are the kind of management services that it seems that Ireland is particularly strong in and has very much been able to grow in the past five years since the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, CETA, provision came into force. I hope that reply is helpful but, of course, if there are more questions, please just let me know.