Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As the Deputy knows, when his party was in government, the Export Trade Council was established. One of the initiatives in our programme for Government was to include private sector members in the council. The council meets quarterly and closely reviews progress made across all of the agencies, not just those under the aegis of my Department, including, for example, Bord Bia, Fáilte Ireland and so on. It is working well and all of the agencies are reporting that they are exceeding their targets, with the exception of those involved in the tourism sector which was hit very hard in one year but which is doing really well in recovering markets. Increasingly, there is an Ireland House-Team Ireland approach being adopted. There is, however, further work to be done in looking at individual countries and delivery of plans within these countries. That is one of the ambitions of the Export Trade Council, namely, to look in a more granular way at individual markets and build on the success of this approach.

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