Mr. Gary Tobin:

I thank the Deputy very much for the question. It is interesting that she mentioned the GII. Our colleagues in the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council have recently published a paper on the GII. The paper was only published in the past two weeks. It attempts to swap out GDP for GNI*. This committee will be very familiar with all the issues with GDP as a measurement tool in Ireland. The National Competitiveness and Productivity Council put the GNI* measure in place. It recalculated the GII to measure innovation across European countries. When it did that, Ireland moved from 22nd place to 12th. While 12th is a lot better than 22nd, I appreciate that it is still not first. We still have important work to do in that regard.

On research and development, we can see there is a significant opportunity for Ireland, using its excellent academic sector and expertise in the technology space, to harness some of these positive aspects of the economy in Ireland and try to pivot them towards research and development. We will work closely with the enterprise agencies, particularly Enterprise Ireland, but also Science Foundation Ireland, SFI, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, and the Marine Institute. All these institutions offer an extensive range of programmes and support to promote investment in research, development and innovation, but this sector-----