I was trying to persuade the Minister of the desirability of adopting this amendment so as to encourage marketing personnel to get out into the marketplace, the consequence of which would be of major importance to domestic industry. I explained the reasons and indicated that the provisos included in our amendment would guarantee that this would only apply to marketing personnel certified by their employers, subsequently certified by CTT and finally authorised by the Revenue Commissioners to qualify for the tax allowance. I mentioned that the revenue implications would be few. If 500 people qualified under this proposal the cost to the Exchequer would be £200,000. That is the amount of money we are talking about for something that would have a major impact on the economy and something that would give a signal to industry that from now on industry would not be penalised but encouraged to get into the marketplace.
I will demonstrate the need for this proposal from my own experiences. I have been approached by many Irish industrialists who agree that the weakness in their programmes to maintain viability is their lack of capacity to exploit good markets and even their lack of capacity to maintain existing markets. I will not use the increasing numbers of liquidations to overstate the case, but liquidations have been increasing at an enormous rate. The usual problems bringing a company to liquidation are inadequate accounting practices and very bad marketing. By and large the problem relates to a company's failure to introduce new products to fill the demands of the market. The multinationals involved in pharmaceuticals and high technology industries know the market and they determine from which point they can supply the market. I am sure any industrialist and the CII will tell the Minister that what I have stated is the case. A company in my home town, Castle Brand went under with a great deal of publicity and one of the great weaknesses there was ineffective marketing strategy. The product was excellent, the workforce were excellent, the skills were beyond compare but marketing strategy was a major problem. That problem applies across the board.
This year the Government are providing something of the order of £270,000 for marketing in the agri-food industry, through the Vote of the Department of Agriculture. That is the order of priority out of a total expenditure allocation of £9,000 million.
One can travel the supermarkets of Europe and in some of the most sophisticated food presentations one would find anywhere, one will not find one Irish product. In my time as Commissioner in Brussels I tried to purchase Irish food. I travelled around the supermarkets and I could not find one Irish product apart from the well known liquid product that I too tried to promote wherever I could. The Minister spent time in Brussels and if the Minister can say that during his time in Brussels he saw many Irish products on the shelves, he must have had a unique experience. All the marketing surveys demonstrate this fact and it has now been clearly pointed out that although we are a member of the EC and Malta is not, their market penetration of the EC is at the same level as ours — and look at the size of Malta and the disabilities they have to overcome.
That is the measure of the problem I am trying to address here, but I am not just addressing a problem. I am much more interested in the wonderful potential there. I have mentioned European countries. Until such time as our people can communicate as easily in French, German, Italian or Dutch, wherever they are selling, until they get into the thought process of the Germans, Italians, French, Dutch or wherever they are selling, until they think and behave like these people, they will not know what the market demand in those countries will be. We talk about technology and advances, when our real potential is in people. That would also argue that the cutbacks in education, for instance, at second and third levels really are just crazy when we should be promoting people who can begin to communicate and then begin to understand the time in which they live.