Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

That is a different issue. The Deputy suggested it was an enclave. We know that output per person in foreign-owned companies is much higher than output per person in domestic companies. That is the case for all sorts of reasons, such as the sectors involved. The pharmaceutical and biopharma areas, for example, have very low labour contents by and large, and that is true wherever they are located. The fact that these industries are significant in Ireland and that the companies involved are foreign-owned influences the figures.

I am sure we can look with more granularity at the different offices, but one does not need to be Einstein to know, for example, that offices in Mumbai and Bangalore or Shenzhen and Shanghai will not perform to anything like the level of offices in the US if we are talking about the number of jobs they deliver per office. However, these are long-term investments and we need to build long-term relationships in those BRIC countries to build for the future. We can try and get more information, but it cannot be simplistically interpreted. We cannot just look at the jobs delivered per office and decide to close one and develop the other on that basis. We need a long-term strategy to build the overseas opportunities.

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