Is that good enough? We are within weeks of the establishment of this agency under Dan Flinter and Pat Molloy. The Minister's Department recently produced a document, Enterprise Ireland Mission Strategy — Clients and Functions. Throughout this short preparatory period there seems to have been little or no consultation with staff in the various agencies involved. In relation to services to businesses, a number of options are considered on page 13 of that document. No decisions have been taken even though we are within weeks of this agency being established. The document states that three major sections of Forbairt — I understand Forbairt in Glasnevin will be the major area — will be closed down and that some of the functions currently exercised by Forbairt would not transfer to Enterprise Ireland.
The Minister is rushing this development. There have been only a few weeks of preparation and now she is expecting the chief executive, Mr. Flinter, and Mr. Pat Molloy to be responsible perhaps over a number of years for the industrial relations fallout which is bound to ensue. A businessman said to me that the Japanese tend to strategically plan things for a number of years and then implement them in a couple of weeks, while the Spanish planned a recent development for a couple of weeks and implemented it painfully over a number of years. The Minister is behaving more like a Spanish than a Japanese Minister.
It is a fact, borne out during my recent tour of Forbairt, that many of the Forbairt staff are demoralised. The Minister has not consulted them. There have been no consultations to date despite the fact that we are a few weeks away from the culmination of this new agency. The Minister is guillotining through this new agency without clearly having thought out what she is going to achieve. She is abandoning the old adage "if it is not broken, do not fix it".
The upshot is that there will be a significant number of redundancies. The Minister is not prepared to face the workers in the agencies concerned. She will leave it to the chief executive, Mr. Flinter, and his staff to spend the early years of the organisation engaged in industrial relations processes rather than in the strategic mission of Enterprise Ireland.