India trade mission: Ireland's future prosperity depends on breaking into major markets such as India, which will be increasingly significant in coming years, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said yesterday.
Speaking in Bangalore at the end of the first full day of the major Irish trade mission which he is leading in India, Mr Ahern declared: "We have to be at the leading edge of trade." Rejecting fears that India's trade protection laws and bureaucracy made it too difficult a market for Irish firms, he said: "This is an excellent place to do business."
Pointing to copyright infringements in some other Asian countries, Mr Ahern said copyright and patents were protected in India by a court system similar to the Irish model.
Earlier, addressing several hundred Indian businesspeople at an Enterprise Ireland lunch, Mr Ahern repeatedly pointed to the extremely high "parallel" growth enjoyed by Ireland and India in recent years.
"India's unprecedented economic growth over the past decade makes it an attractive prospect for companies seeking new markets for their products and services.
"The software and IT sector has been the powerhouse of economic growth," he said, adding that the Indian government had set even more ambitious growth targets for the year ahead.
The Government, he said, had turned its attention to India over the past year as part of its post-1999 strategy to develop Asian markets for Irish companies.
India had not been on the first round of countries targeted because the State had had to marshal its resources and could not target every country in the region together. He emphasised that this week's trade mission was an exploratory one for many of the 90 firms and organisations from the Republic and Northern Ireland taking part.
"It is also an opportunity to look more closely at the scope for developing greatly expanded commercial and trade links between our two countries," he said.
Although Irish trade with India was currently "small, too small", Mr Ahern insisted it could be increased significantly. Although Irish-owned companies would not be able to compete, necessarily, with global giants for the biggest contracts, they had been able to create profitable niche markets in a wide variety of areas, he said.
"In many of the new technologies, innovation rather than size is what matters, and it is not just possible but commonplace for a very small company, with limited resources, to compete with the best," he said.
Later the Taoiseach, accompanied by Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin, Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism John O'Donoghue, and Minister for Education and Science Mary Hanafin, met the governor of Karnataka province, Triloki Nath Chaturvedi.
He also attended the formal launch of the UN programme to introduce computers into hundreds of thousands of Indian schools, which is partly funded by Ireland.
Today, the trade mission heads to New Delhi, where the Taoiseach will attend the renaming of one of the capital's streets in honour of Eamon de Valera, who visited during the 1940s and who had contact with leading figures in India's independence movement.
