Mr. Michael Carey:

The board is incredibly impressive. It is made up of real experts in enterprise development. These are individuals, men and women, who have extraordinary experience. It is humbling to be chair of a board like it. Having met each of the members individually and spent time with each of them over the past few weeks, one after the other, each has impressed more than the previous member. They are extraordinary.

One of my key roles of the chair of any board is to make sure members can contribute fully and bring all of their expertise and knowledge to the table and that they are listened to and have their views and thoughts taken into account. Regarding the running of the board, the meetings are monthly and run for four or five hours. There is a very robust process, with which I am very impressed, to avoid conflicts of interest among board members. It is an extremely robust process and it is followed clearly.

As I said in the opening statement, I am very keen that we get close to the clients and can establish a network of connections with more client companies to connect with the board. I am keen to establish more advisory panels and reach out more to the clients and other stakeholders using the board to make those connections.

The board needs to focus on the big issues facing Enterprise Ireland. It is crucially important that we have some real experts on the board in some of the areas I mentioned, including sustainability. There are people on the board who have great experience in the areas of digitalisation and scaling. Equally, the executive team in Enterprise Ireland is hugely impressive and its members need to work with the board to get the best out of the time to which the board commits. Each of those board members commits significant time to the process and we need to honour that.