Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Here is the fear. The IFS strategy basically said that we are going to make two big plays. One is in financial technology, FinTech, and one in another place. Post-Brexit, it was taken back into the Department and it came back out Brexit-proofed. If the pre- and post-Brexit versions are compared, they are pretty much the same. It still says two plays, which is FinTech and another one, which escapes me. Brexit presents a big opportunity, which is now different, which is to say that we are not just going to try to get insurance companies, reinsurance companies, trading firms and so forth. There is a real opportunity to say that we can bring the entire ecosystem over to Dublin or wherever it sets up in Ireland. One of the reasons London is so strong is because it has the full ecosystem.

A core piece of this is the infrastructure. The fear from financial services players in Dublin is that we might bring some of these firms over, but because we do not create a sustainable infrastructure around them, in time they might move to Luxembourg, Frankfurt or elsewhere. The information I have from very well-placed people within the industry is that the infrastructure firms are not being approached by the State and need to be. The infrastructure firms are saying that they are being wined and dined by the French, the Belgians and the Spanish and by Luxembourg, and they are not seeing sight nor sound of the Irish. Nobody is saying that the Minister of State is not busy. We know he is busy. My sense is that we could be more strategic, more clever and have a strategy that encompasses the full ecosystem so that when we get these firms over here, they stay here and grow rather than relocating here temporarily.

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