I failed to get a satisfactory response from the Minister on a number of points I raised. The Minister says the company get better terms because of the State guarantee. I put it to him that the State can borrow money at even better rates. We all know that at the end of the day it is the taxpayer who will pay the bill. What the Minister is doing is prescribing a slow, lingering death for Irish Steel and he has not the courage or the honesty to come out and say so. He talked about niceties, overruns and so on. I agree with him. In my short time in that office I took action and tried to come to grips with some of the problems.
One theme which runs through all these companies is that there appears to be an absence of a fixed price contract. The Minister did not say that if any of the money was recovered it would lessen the burden for Irish Steel. Is any action being taken against the design people who carried out the work? We all know the cost doubled over what it was supposed to be, and this gave rise to borrowings, State equities and so on. We have had no information on that.
The Minister mentioned borrowing as a holding operation. At the start I said it was a holding operation. Yet he admits that one basic assumption in the consultants' report and apparently in the company's own corporate plan, as I recall it, has not been realised in the first year. I fail to see what further information he expects to get over the next six months which he has not got now, except that he will know whether the EEC are prepared to go along with the package he is now putting to them. He failed to answer all the other questions. He said there was a 10 per cent drop in sale prices, and a 10 per cent increase in volume. As I recall it, production should have doubled from 37,500 tons to 75,000 tons in the first year. There was no comment on that.
I believe the £25 million we are talking about is a holding operation to give the Government an opportunity, at a different time and in different circumstances, to make the decision which I believe they have made in their own minds already, but they have not got the honesty to say so. They are now about to do what they told everybody else not to do, that is, to borrow for current day-to-day expenses. If the company borrow, it looks better than having the State borrow, and this keeps the Minister's borrowing requirement down. We all know that at the end of the day the taxpayer will pay. It is a holding operation, and I look forward to a debate later on this year when I will be able to refer back to some of the things I said today.
