I move:
That Seanad Éireann, expresses its grave concern at the sudden closure of the Hyster Plant in Blanchardstown, Dublin 15 and in view of the consequent 250 job losses and the substantial State investment in the plant, calls on the Government to take immediate action to ensure the continuance of the industry and that all facts leading to the closure are made public.
May I place on record my appreciation of the Leader of the House for making time available this morning for a discussion on a matter of great public concern and interest? The closure of the Hyster plant at Blanchardstown is a bitter blow for many people. First of all, it is a bitter blow for those whose jobs are gone almost literally overnight and in such a brutal way. It is a bitter blow for the IDA which had invested so much hope and so much of the taxpayers' money in this venture. It is a sad blow to the Government's job creation programme and also a bitter blow to our overall economy and our morale at this point in our history.
The whole episode is one which raises some very serious questions and which invites, in the words of The Irish Times this morning, the most rigorous post mortem. The questions which must be asked, and which we will be asking this morning, are ones which the Government will want to answer fully and openly. I say this not in any sense of party or political recrimination. Questions concerning jobs and peoples' livelihoods are of far greater importance than any political differences in this House. Nobody in any party will want to make any capital out of this catastrophe.
The way in which the closure was effected leaves a very bad taste all around. The idea that people should arrive, first thing in the morning, to find the gates locked against them, without explanation, without any plans worked out for redundancy, without even the courtesy of an explanation is something which flies in the face of any standards of decent industrial relations. The Hyster firm has not done itself, or the image of multinational companies in this country, any service whatsoever by the way in which it so brutally effected the closure of this plant. I wonder if the Government were aware in 1982 of the reputation of Hyster for sudden closures and sudden pull-outs of this kind when it finalised the original deal?
The immediate priority for the Government and the IDA — and it is not going to be an easy one — is to try to ensure that alternative industry is found for the Blanchardstown area and in particular for use of the plant in question. Apparently, Hyster are simply getting up and walking away from the whole mess. The plight of those who are thrown out of work is not so simple unless some similar "hi-tech" industry can be found. The fact is that these people may never work in this country again. Many of these are young people who invested their hopes in this new plant, who have taken out mortgages, who are in debt, who began to build up their families on the basis of the future held out for them and the expectation that they had a secure future. These people will now find themselves saddled with debt and may well find that the only path open to them is to emigrate. We cannot afford to lose these highly skilled people. We owe it to them to make every effort to find some sort of alternative employment of a similar kind. I know that this will be the priority of the Minister and of the Government in this matter.
Serious questions must be asked as far as the IDA are concerned in all of this. I hope that the IDA will come forward with full and open answers to these questions, some of which were raised in the other House yesterday. Since Hyster began operations in 1982 in this country the IDA have pumped in a total of over £15 million in capital, in employment training and research and development grants to the Hyster company. It is not known how much Hyster itself put in, but it is believed that the ratio is small, certainly far smaller than could be expected in a joint venture of this kind. It is also believed that the IDA were preparing to invest almost £40 million of taxpayers' money in the project — £28.9 million in capital employment and other grants and a further £11.3 million in research and development grants. Fortunately, that money has not been invested. The question which people will want to know the answer to is how much, if any, of the £15 million of taxpayers' money we are likely to get back. The answer would seem to be little, if any, of that money.
The sheer scale of the loss itself raises enormous questions about how the plant came into existence. It was conceived in a blaze of publicity five short years ago. At that time we were told — and I am afraid when it comes to hyping up possible successes in advance the IDA are rarely found wanting, and the coming into existence of this project was surrounded by a blaze of publicity — that eventually there would be 1,500 jobs. There are many of us who, from experience over the years, are very sceptical of the job promises made by the IDA, because these promises are of jobs when the plant is in full production. It is something less than fully honest to assure a community that 1,500 jobs will be available almost as a certainty when that promise is dependent on so many other factors. Experience would seem to indicate that the IDA have rarely succeeded in fulfilling the full allocation of jobs promised at the beginning of many of the plants which they succeeded in bringing to this country. A more realistic less highkey approach by the IDA in terms of promises of this kind might be a welcome departure in their policy. It would be welcomed all round, in which case the impact of the losses might not be so great.
In 1982 it was believed that the IDA had pulled off one of the great coups of the decade by swiping the Hyster plant virtually from under the noses of the Northern Ireland Development Authority. We must now ask if in the zeal to pull off this coup the whole project was rushed through without being subjected to proper critical evaluation and whether the need of the IDA to get the plant at any cost meant the suspension of proper critical judgment. It must be asked whether the Government and/or the IDA, or both, entered into a venture with a very high degree of risk, without properly safeguarding the public investment involved.
We are told in The Irish Press today that a special Cabinet meeting was held on a Sunday, 19 May 1982, to rush through the deal and have it announced in time for the by-election which was taking place in Dublin west at that time. I would like to have an assurance from the Minister that at that Sunday Cabinet meeting, held suddenly, all the proper assurances were given and received that the taxpayers' money would not be put at risk as part of a venture which was unlikely to succeed. I would like to have an assurance from the Minister that all of the proper procedures were carried out, that the advice of the Department of Finance was fully listened to and that all attempts were made to ensure that this was a prudent venture which would not put at risk huge amounts of taxpayers' money. There are many people who believe that this may not have been the case. I would like a detailed assurance from the Minister that all the proper steps were taken, that the risks were not inordinate and that the whole deal was not arrived at in a game of high stakes poker, where Hyster simply hawked their wares around from one country to the other, playing one country's bid off against the other, so that in the end it was capable of getting a deal here which perhaps no other country would accept.
There are other more fundamental problems. The Hyster collapse raises a fundamental problem about the whole overall thrust of IDA policy. Over the years — probably the whole country, the IDA, different Governments and political parties — we have all relied on overseas investment to do much of the work of job creation for us at the expense and to the detriment of the development of many of our indigenous industries. Heavy reliance on overseas investment is fine when it works. Much of the time it has worked in this country. What happens when, as apparently happened in this case, international markets suddenly change? We find then that international companies not surprisingly owe us no loyalty. Their first imperative is to defend their own interests and they will act accordingly. That has happened here. It may happen again. Unfortunately, in the current economic uncertainty it probably will happen again. That particular eventuality does not seem to have been guarded against in the general thrust of IDA policy and in Government policy over the years in their attempt to base so much of our job creation and our industrial development on an over-reliance on investment in international companies.
It is clear now that this over-dependence on this strategy, and not putting enough emphasis on the development of our own indigenous industries, may well have been a mistake and may be at the root of the problems which we are talking about here today. I would like to recall in conclusion one further point about the Hyster operation. It may be remembered that a couple of years ago the then Minister responsible, Deputy John Bruton, refused to accede to a request by the IDA for further State investment in Hyster. The Minister was not happy that the Hyster plant at that stage had a healthy long-term future. What also may be remembered is the extent to which the Minister was virtually taken on by the IDA on that occasion when he was first publicly challenged to state who made industrial policy in this country. He was asked was it the IDA or was it the Government of the day?
I believe that in some ways the IDA, because of their undoubted successes, but also because of the tremendous success they have had in presenting their own image as the great success story, have to a certain extent created an immunity from proper public scrutiny both of their policy and of their operations. I am not just talking about the huge amounts of public money needlessly invested in the elaborate and luxurious new IDA head offices. I am talking about the capacity they have to create the impression that they know best as far as industrial policy is concerned. That particular instance did not show the IDA in a good light. They were prepared to use their undoubted muscle in the areas of media and public relations to try to reverse a Government decision.
We can see with hindsight that, unfortunately, in that particular case the Minister was right. We were safeguarded from further huge losses of public investment in that company because no matter what had happened the shifting international markets probably would have meant that that money would have been further good money going after bad. It is time that we in this House and in the Oireachtas as a whole made a very searching examination of the role and functions of the IDA, their strategies and the scope of their policy. The whole area of industrial policy should be given much greater time and attention here in this House and not simply be the preserve of any State company, however good they may be. I look forward to hearing from the Minister a full reply to the questions I have raised.