Mr. Gerard Brady:

We got a lot of questions, probably earlier in the year, as to whether companies would up and leave, and that was never the threat. The threat is that we will find it harder to win the next generation of investment. We get a lot of that feedback now and not just because of uncertainty. We have examples of members who have won investments into the country and cannot complete those investments because they are stuck in planning or judicial review, for example. Energy costs is probably the one that comes up, with labour costs probably on the smaller side. For larger companies, Ireland is not cheap on any level but energy costs stand out. We are one of the most expensive energy cost countries in the developed world. It is a major challenge. A large part of that is fixed costs, not of the electricity itself but the delivery of that electricity. We need to look quite seriously about how we can reduce those costs. It will require more funding of infrastructure directly by the State rather than putting that on users in future, particularly as we build so much infrastructure in the next decade.

In the other areas where we look at costs, especially in the SME space, labour costs have been the number one issue, along with energy. A lot of the labour cost challenge for many of them is policy driven. Going back to that PRSI rebate, the idea of that is to take pressure off companies that are most acutely challenged by the labour cost increases of recent years that have been policy driven rather than something that is applying to all companies together.