Mary White (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State and his staff and congratulate him on bringing this Bill towards its conclusion. I know from my own experience as a businessperson how important innovation and creativity are. No business can grow, and never could grow, unless the drivers of the business were innovative and came up with new ideas. I know from my 16 years with our business, where we work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that we were very protective and quite neurotic about protecting the recipes we had for our particular product. We spent years adding creativity and innovation to our product, and we now employ 130 people. We would not have done so without innovation and creativity. At times, we ran into people copying what we did. I know how important the need for patent legislation, and updating the legislation, is.

I had personal pleasure in being part of the intellectual property issue. Before his last budget as Minister for Finance, I meet with the former Deputy, Charlie McCreevy, to ask him to remove the stamp duty on intellectual property. I was delighted he did so. I have a sense of personal achievement in that I have added to this.

Other contributors spoke about products and the contribution to the economy of the international companies here. For example, Apple and its chief executive officer, Steve Jobs, have brought the Macintosh computer into our homes, in contrast to the mainframes that existed. They made computers accessible to human beings, and the company has repeated the feat with its iPod.

People can have a gift for creativity. I am revising my child care document at the moment and I am struggling to add creativity to it. It must be creative, and there is no point in just having a mundane report or proposal. As a businessperson there is a struggle within me to be creative all the time.

I congratulate the Minister of State, and I thank him again.