SIPTU is the largest union in the country and it came forward to discuss the matter with the Minister of State, Deputy Molloy. Perhaps other groups did the same. The Government will listen to all voices in this area. I met the representatives of FAIR in the House last week and it was an impressive group of women who put forward their arguments in a reasonable fashion. We had a good discussion.
As regards the question about who can deal with liquidations and wind downs, the board of a company can liquidate a company on a voluntary basis. The creditors of a company can petition a court for a liquidation. I am not sure if that is the point the Chairman was making. Perhaps he was referring to the phoenix type syndrome. The new director of company law enforcement will now have responsibilities in that area. We will launch his office this evening. From midnight tonight the functions I currently have under the Companies Acts will transfer to him on a gradual basis over the next three or four months. If somebody hives off the assets of a company and incorrectly applies them, he can apply to the court to have them back and to ensure they go back into the company. He can apply to have assets frozen. He has extraordinary powers to intervene under the new Act and to act to ensure company law is enforced and that the stakeholders' and com-panies' rights are protected.
I will deal with some of the issues DeputyRabbitte raised, although he has left the meeting. He asked why only £1 million was saved as a result of the transfer of community employment to the Department of Education and Science. It is the case that perhaps up to 800 persons or more have transferred over to it. However, £13 million was transferred to the Department of Education and Science, in addition to £1 million. The reason it is only a saving of £1 million is that there were higher costs for those retained in community employment than might have been envisaged. In other words, we have a saving of £1 million, not £13 million. Last year was the first time that people in the jobs initiative scheme received a Christmas bonus. The Government felt it was important that they should receive that bonus, like other recipients of social welfare and community employment schemes who get 100% of their welfare payments by way of a Christmas bonus.
I should not have to tell Deputy Ahern that Members of the Oireachtas do not warrant a Christmas bonus, much as we might welcome one. The idea of the Christmas bonus is for those at the very bottom. It is generally accepted that those on welfare - perhaps not in every single case, but by and large - as a class of individuals, are at the bottom in our society.
Deputy Rabbitte wondered whether other companies are in the Terradine situation and to the best of my knowledge there are none. I am not aware of any announced investment that is not now proceeding. Because of the slow down, companies are reassessing their operations and some investments have been delayed for the moment while others have been scaled back. That is why the IDA's capital grants to industry are not as high as we had anticipated. That mainly concerns commitments the IDA had entered into five, six or seven years ago whereby moneys are paid out on a gradual basis as investments are made and jobs created.
Notwithstanding the difficulties, the medical devices industry is doing extremely well. Yesterday I met with the chief financial officer of Microsoft worldwide. That company is currently recruiting 200 people in the Dublin area. Lucent Technologies is also recruiting. Today, the Cabinet approved a job expansion scheme for County Mayo which will create over 200 jobs. So there is good news and that is why it is important to keep matters in perspective.
Deputy Rabbitte asked me what forecast I agreed with. I am not in the business of forecasting. The OECD has said that next year the Irish economy will grow by about 4%. In some parts of the world 4% would be considered a boom. I visited Australia in September and the government there was taking great credit for the fact that the economy was growing by 4% per annum. It was predicted that it would help the Howard government to be re-elected, and that has happened, notwithstanding some predictions to the contrary. So if 4% is good news in Australia, what is happening here is not as gloomy as some commentators would have us believe. The OECD has also said that the Irish economy is in a much healthier state than most other European economies, to be able to recover quickly from the slowdown. It is forecasting growth rates of 6% plus for 2003. Whatever about the percentages, therefore, we are growing and, as I said recently in the Dáil, the car is still moving along. We may not be in the 60 mph zone but we are still moving forward in the 30 mph zone which is important.
Deputies Rabbitte and Ahern raised the issue of work permit allocation. The permits are given to employers who must apply for them on behalf of potential employees. We have come across cases of fraud which have been referred to the Garda authorities. I do not have figures for complaints but we have also come across cases where people were brought to this country and were not treated very well. They did not seem to have been made aware of the conditions of employment by the agency that recruited them. That is why we are now insisting that the potential employee must first sign the application form and must be aware of the conditions of employment. If employees have a bad experience we have been flexible in giving them a permit for a different employer.
We have made it clear that anybody who abuses foreign employees will not be given other permits. We have to take a hard nosed approach to this because we do not want to see foreign nationals who are here legally - yet who, in many cases, come from poor countries, are in a vulnerable position, miles from home and may not even speak English - being discriminated against. Labour laws apply to foreigners among us as they do to Irish people.
When I said the Government would have to be less liberal and more conservative in the manner in which it assesses applications for work permits, that was as much a warning to employers as it was to anybody else. Even since 11 September, we are still getting 1,200 applications a week. It seems that some employers are ignoring the potential locally, or perhaps they are not prepared to pay the market rate. That is why we intend to introduce a new mechanism which I hope to bring before the Cabinet shortly, to ensure that, in the first instance, employers exhaust all possibilities to recruit the personnel they require in Ireland. It is only when that process has been exhausted that we will consider an application for a person from outside the EEA area. Four years ago we were granting fewer than 3,000 work permits a year, but already this year we have granted 33,000. Therefore, one can see that over the duration of this Government's term of office, we have gone from a conservative regime to perhaps the most liberal regime in Europe, but our first responsibility has to be to our own citizens. Anybody who is here with a work permit will obviously stay in place. There is no question of withdrawing permits and sending people home; I am talking about procedures for new permits and new situations as they arise.
Deputies raised the question of support for small industry. The total budget for my Department is about \1.3 billion of which roughly half goes to FÁS, much of it for training people in employment, and as much for small companies as for larger ones. Some 25% of the budget goes to community employment schemes. The remainder, other than the £40 million that goes to pay salaries and administrative costs of my Department and the Labour Court, goes to support industry. The bulk of it goes to small to medium-sized industries. It is a myth that small industry is not supported, although I keep hearing that complaint. We cannot give operating aid to industries but Enterprise Ireland supports small industries. I would say that not all the companies they support are large, by any stretch of the imagination. As a country we compare favourably with our counterparts in other European countries as regards the range of supports available.
The most effective way a Government can support industry is by helping to create the environment that allows entrepreneurship to flourish. The personal income tax, corporate tax and capital gains tax policies that we have introduced, make this a favourable climate in which to reward risk taking and entrepreneurship. That, together with the development of infrastructure, particularly in the regions, will ensure that we can remain competitive and help our companies to grow. I want to see more Irish companies growing and developing, and not just having a situation where we are always importing world class companies. In recent years we have grown some very successful Irish world class companies and we have the potential to grow many more in future. This is because our education system, coupled with the sense of confidence that has grown in recent years, gives us the edge in helping to create world class companies for the future. Hopefully, the support the Government provides can bring that about.
Deputy Ahern has spoken to me on a number of occasions about his concerns regarding the HSA but, clearly, when it comes to health and safety matters, I cannot intervene. It is an operational issue for the Health and Safety Authority which has a board and staff to deal with such matters. In the past, the general criticism was that the HSA has not been enforcing the law. Only last week, however, we saw that a company was fined £250,000 for breaching the health and safety regulations, so the law is beginning to be enforced. If, as the expert body in this area, the HSA takes a certain view about any projects, then clearly it would be wrong of me, or any other member of the Government, to intervene, particularly since there seems to be a legal dimension to what Deputy Ahern has raised. Every problem has to be solved, however, and I want to see whatever issues remain to be resolved in Ballymun being resolved. The Ballymun regeneration project is a very good one and is important for the people who live there and those who represent them. The problems clearly have to be resolved and I hope that can be done quickly. It should not require a huge amount of time to resolve every problem or to get things right. I do not know why, unfortunately, it has not been resolved many weeks on. I will inquire as to why that is the case and revert to Deputy Ahern on another occasion.