Seanad Éireann díospóireacht -
Tuesday, 21 Dec 1982

Vol. 99 No. 4

Kilkenny Design Workshops Limited Bill, 1982: Second Stage.

Question proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time".

Minister for Industry and Energy (Mr. J. Bruton)

The purpose of the Bill is to give Kilkenny Design Workshops Ltd. (KDW) statutory backing, to provide for an increase in its ordinary share capital from £100 to £1 million and for the taking up by the Minister for Finance of shares in the company.

KDW is one of our smaller State bodies. Yet despite its size, it performs valuable functions in the national interest. It has developed into a well run and multi-disciplinary agency with the joint objective of improving standards of design in the craft and craft based industries and of stimulating public interest in good design since its establishment in 1963. It employs 130 people; 82 in the Kilkenny workshops and 48 in the Dublin and Kilkenny retail shops. It is financed by an annual grant-in-aid from my Department and by fee and royalty income.

Through its extensive workshops, skilled technicians and craftsmen, it now provides industry with a very comprehensive design advisory and practical support service. This is KDW's primary role. Thus Irish manufacturers have for the asking specialised and expert advice on product design and development and, in some instances, market opportunities. If we as a nation are to maximise the benefits of the many hundreds of thousands of pounds spent annually by the State on industrial development in all its aspects, industry here must move, and move fast, into high value-added products. If this does not happen the consequences in both economic and social terms could be disastrous. Therefore, I am greatly encouraged to see that KDW allocates as much as two-thirds of its resources to the design of products in areas of advanced technology such as electronics, optics, telephone equipment and engineering products.

This does not mean of course that our small or craft industries are being neglected. Indeed the closest practical co-operation exists between KDW, the IDA, Shannon Development and the Crafts Council of Ireland.

KDW also plays a very active part in designer training, beginning with the new graduate near to or immediately after qualification. Through its finely tuned design and training programmes, young designers can gain practical experience and training both at home and abroad in all facets of design.

Good design like so much else depends on consumer acceptance. The promotion of public awareness of the value of good design is an important function of KDW. During its early years it was very conscious of the need for a show place where the consumer, visitor or buyer could see a representative range of the best of Irish designed and made products. There is no doubt that the shop, which KDW opened in Nassau Street, Dublin, in 1976, fulfils this need. In 1981 turnover reached £1.3 million when over a half million people visited the shop.

The Dublin shop until now has been financed entirely on borrowings both for start-up expenses and in funding of working capital associated with the company's increased sales. Because of the unprecedentedly high rates of interest that have prevailed in the meantime a cumulative operating surplus, after depreciation, of £105,000 has been turned into a cumulative deficit of £187,000.

Butler House, which is part of KDW's headquarters, underwent substantial renovations during the 1971-77 period. Though Butler House is self-financing on a day-to-day basis an outstanding debt of £100,000 remains to be discharged from the renovation costs.

A proposal by KDW for financial restructuring was examined by management consultants. The consultants advised that an equity injection of £500,000 into KDW was justified from an economic viewpoint. They recommended an injection of £400,000 equity into the Dublin retail operation and £100,000 into the design operation. The previous Government accepted the consultants' recommendation and made provision for a capital allocation of £500,000 in this year's Estimates. As a general principle I would admonish all State companies involved in commercial activities to ensure that the State capital invested in them earns a commercial rate of return.

The present Bill provides for an increase in the share capital from £100 to £1 million. It is proposed that £500,000 would be taken up immediately by the Minister for Finance in shares so as to reduce by £400,000 existing borrowings in the Dublin shop and repay the £100,000 loans outstanding from the conversion of Butler House. The balance of £500,000 could be taken up at some future date to finance further capital development. Any further capital injection into KDW will have to be justified on strict commercial grounds.

Mr. Lanigan

I welcome the Minister and express pleasure that his first job was to introduce this Bill which I warmly commend. I suppose I am the Senator who is closest to KDW as it is situated at the back of my house and no matter where I go in Kilkenny KDW surrounds me. It gives me great pleasure also to welcome this increase in the capital allocation at a time when Pat Henderson is sitting up at the back taking notes. I am not too sure what notes he is taking about this Bill but he used to take certain notes from me at one time. Kilkenny in both the sporting and industrial fields has benefited from Pat Henderson's involvement. I am saying this in public for the first time: if every chief executive of a small public body took as much interest in the public bodies as Pat takes in his we would have a fantastic public sector.

It is suggested that £400,000 of the increase is to ensure that the retail shop in Nassau Street becomes self-supporting, that the banks can be paid off and that the other £100,000 is for repayment of loans on other elements of KDW. I criticised Bill Walsh very vehemently when the KDW shop was opened in Nassau Street because I felt that it was a diminution of what KDW had been set up for but Bill Walsh in his wisdom at the time suggested that I might be wrong. I am glad to say that I was wrong. At that time Nassau Street was not a retail shopping area in Dublin and KDW were getting involved in very high cost for retail selling space in an area where there was no retail selling space as such at the time. I felt that the role of KDW was not in retail selling and I am glad to see that I was proved wrong. The KDW shop has proved that if you produce good quality products, Irish-made products, and Irish-designed products, you will create your own market and this is what happened in the Nassau Street area.

I was at the press conference when KDW were set up. The concept of KDW at that stage was a craft-based design workshops. From the beginning in the crafts situation KDW have done a marvellous job. There are people in Kilkenny who never thought that the day would come when the son of a stonemason would become a silversmith or the son of a labourer would become a goldsmith. If you go around Kilkenny and in particular the south-east area today you will find people working in gold, working in silver, working in stone and working in wood. They are people who otherwise would never have gone into that type of industry, the craftsman-type job in terms of the valuable metals or the valuable stones. They would have gone into cutting stone. They would have gone into the Board of Works or they would have gone into working on Kilkenny Castle or working in Cahir and various other places like that but thankfully the original people who went into Kilkenny have produced a number of excellent craftsmen in precious metals. No matter where you go in the world today some of the craftsmen in Kilkenny are well known. Some of the people who came in to train these craftsmen originally are equally well known. I thought that the design structures they brought in originally were too much northern European or too much west European. The apprentices they brought in produced a marriage of craftsmanship between the northern European harshness and the southern softness. We have an Irish design structure in crafts at present which came from Kilkenny Design Workshops of which we can be proud. Looking at the development of KDW through the years we are very proud of it as a tourist attraction and I hope that it will remain a tourist attraction. It is marvellous to go into a shop or airport abroad and see somebody carrying a KDW bag. There was a time when I wondered whether that bag came from Dublin or Kilkenny but now if I see that black and white KDW bag and I am in France or in Germany there is a sense of pride that we are able to sell something designed in Kilkenny and manufactured in Cavan or Clane. I think in the future it might be manufactured in Berlin and that is where the value of this Bill can come in. We have designers in Ireland who can produce a designed structure which will be acceptable abroad.

Two things put Kilkenny on the map. One of them is gone and the other is still there. The Kilkenny Design Workshops are still there; the Kilkenny Beer Festival is gone but the two of them happened to coincide in their beginnings. The Kilkenny Design Workshops owe a lot to the Kilkenny Beer Festival because of the number of people who came to Kilkenny for the festival and brought in the Kilkenny Design Workshops originally. It was directly opposite Kilkenny Castle—

Mr. J. Bruton

They were sober when they designed.

Mr. Lanigan

They were obviously sober when they designed because Kilkenny Design Workshops are still there and the Kilkenny Beer Festival is gone. KDW will continue as a tourist attraction. The shops in Kilkenny are a tourist attraction and they are in a beautiful setting. Lately we have noticed that the design emphasis is changing from craft to the industrial and it was stated in the Minister's speech that this is so. I have noticed in quite a number of areas that KDW designers are involved in heavy engineering, in light engineering, in transport and various activities and areas that we would not know about, or areas where we would not consider that design consciousness would be worthwhile.

The Minister in his speech did not mention the agricultural sector and design in that context. I sincerely hope he did not omit it because KDW are not involved. Irrespective of what happens in industry in Ireland, we are going to be an agriculturally-based industrial nation. There is a large number of areas in agriculture where good design is important. The fact that £500,000 is becoming available to KDW to eliminate bank borrowing or interest repayments is of tremendous value because what up to now was being made in commercial terms went towards repaying borrowings. In commercial terms judged on the basis of semi-State bodies KDW have done quite well because they are repaying borrowings. Now, with the injection of this capital amount they will be able to develop their business into other areas and what was up to now being repaid to banks can be injected into the KDW development itself.

Somebody said to me that the only reason I was becoming involved in this discussion was because I was from Kilkenny but the impact of KDW on design in Ireland and on industry has not yet been realised. A bottle of perfume is a bottle of perfume and a flower is a flower — we have a flower in the chair this evening, for the last evening.

An Cathaoirleach

The last evening.

Mr. Lanigan

Presentation means everything and KDW have given us presentation. They have given us good design and now they are getting the money to make progress in the future.

Professor Dooge

I would like to join with Senator Lanigan in welcoming this Bill. During the earlier part of his speech I feared that only someone from Kilkenny or indeed only somebody whose house backed on Butler House would be allowed to talk on this Bill but I am glad that in his closing remarks he invited all of us to contribute. Since the name Dooge comes from Carlow which is in the same constituency I suppose I would have been permitted to speak anyway.

Mr. Lanigan

He is campaigning again.

Professor Dooge

There have been a lot of commercials this evening.

An Cathaoirleach

All day.

Professor Dooge

I welcome this Bill. It is another welcome step in the development of Kilkenny Design Workshops. It reflects a very real growth which started in the early 1960s when Kilkenny Design Workshops were very much under the wing of Córas Tráchtála for a while and were overshadowed by it and got a perfunctory reference in the annual reports of Córas Tráchtála. When they were given independent status in 1973, there was an immediate impetus and the work and value to the community of the Kilkenny Design Workshops improved to a very substantial degree. We will look to Kilkenny Design Workshops for a similar increase now that they have been given this statutory recognition.

They have served us extremely well. Their job was a very necessary one. It is probably as a result of our history but we in Ireland have been very deficient in the plastic arts. During the years of what Corkery described as "The Hidden Ireland" the whole genius of this country went into language and the manipulation of language in the form of an underground culture. So, when at last we became independent we had quite an uphill task to recover the plastic arts. It could not be said that there was something in our nature that made us deficient in this regard because we can look back to the early Christian culture when the plastic arts were extremely well developed.

We can look at certain phases since that early Christian culture. This was a Christian and a Celtic absorption of things many of which were pre-Christian and pre-Celtic. We have a similar absorption——

Mr. Lanigan

In the last Bill the words "novelty" and "nova" were used and my interpretation of "novelty" and "nova" was questioned. When the Senator talks about plastic art is he talking about plastic in terms of plastic or is he using a language with which I am not familiar?

Professor Dooge

I am very sorry. I mean plastic in the sense that one works on materials with one's hands and not in the sense of modern materials many of which are very far from being artistic or even being capable of being turned into works of art. Someone said earlier this evening on another Bill that it was bad to define. I am very happy that Senator Lanigan forced me to define here, otherwise I could have been completely misunderstood.

Mr. Lanigan

I accept what Senator Dooge has said because I would not accept that KDW were involved in plastics.

Professor Dooge

I agree. We can look around us here in the city of Dublin and see another absorption of a tradition. In this House we meet in the middle of Georgian Dublin. We can see here an architectural style which arose in England and was adapted for our own purposes by the Anglo-Irish. As Senator Lanigan has said, we can see in the work of the Kilkenny Design Workshops an absorption of the approach of the Scandinavian school of design which has been reinterpreted in an Irish idiom. This is the great success of the Kilkenny Design Workshops.

This whole effort dates back to the 1961 report on "Design in Ireland" which was essentially a Scandinavian report pointing out to us the way in which we might go in order to develop indigenous design in this country. As Senator Lanigan said and I agree with him the work of the design workshop has outgrown that. It has taken over that tradition and reinterpreted it in Irish terms. This has been very much a success story.

The Minister in his speech said that one of the essential things that the Kilkenny Design Workshops were concerned with was consumer acceptance. They have done a great deal in this task. I suggest that it is probably an area in which they still have quite an amount to do. We have the retail outlets in Kilkenny and Dublin which have contributed. While there has been an improvement in the appreciation of design we still have a long way to go. In regard to what has been achieved, one can note with great pleasure the increase year by year in the number of visitors to the Kilkenny Design Workshops. Many of them are tourists but many of them also are schoolchildren who are taken there. This is an excellent activity. Nobody could possibly visit the design workshop without being thrilled by what they saw there and coming away with a realisation that this was a facet of the new Ireland, of the modern Ireland and that here we were able to hold our own.

On the question of consumer acceptance perhaps we could look to the Kilkenny Design Workshops in the future as they start off as it were on phase three of their operation to seek links with the other bodies that are concerned with the question of education in design, education in art and education in the appreciation of art. It is very appropriate to say this in this House which was for many years the house of the Royal Dublin Society. Our education in art, whether it be in fine art, in architecture or in craft, dates back to the middle of the eighteenth century and the very early years of the Dublin Society before it was even the Royal Dublin Society. Since then and particularly since the middle of the nineteenth century education in art and design had a very checkered history. There have been improvements in this area but not enough.

In their second phase the Kilkenny Design Workshops came out from under the wing of Córas Tráchtála. While not neglecting the question of marketing in any sense, marketing should cease to be an overall preoccupation so that the Kilkenny Design Workshops, while maintaining what they have done in these particular areas, could in their third phase of operation look at the question of educating the consumer public. Nothing could be more damaging to what the Kilkenny Design Workshops are attempting to achieve than the isolation of the designer from the community. That isolation existed when the Kilkenny Design Workshops started. They have overcome it to a great extent but there is more to be done in this regard.

I unreservedly welcome the Bill. I congratulate the Kilkenny Design Workshops on what they have done. We do not even have to go as far as Nassau Street to see the results of their work. The carpet in the ante-room was designed for this House by the Kilkenny Design Workshops. We went to them because at that time it was considered by the Clerk of the House and me that nothing but the best was good enough for Seanad Éireann and the place to get the best design was in the Kilkenny Design Workshops. We welcome what they have done. They have now been given statutory authority. They have been given funding by the Minister. They can now go ahead. When we come again to this House, possibly in a few years' time, to discuss them while we appreciate what they have done we will expect still more from them in the future.

Minister for Industry and Energy (Mr. J. Bruton)

I thank the Seanad for the welcome given to this Bill. I should like to make a few comments about the matter. I have not had much time since becoming Minister responsible for the KDW to review their operation and any observations I make at this stage are very preliminary.

It is desirable that the precise objects of the KDW be enshrined in legislation. It is not desirable that a State company should function as this one has done in the form of a private company receiving State funds without their objects being clearly defined by statute. This Bill does not provide, I regret to say, a clear statement of the objects of KDW. These are to be found in the memorandum and articles of association. I must say that the objects are defined so widely in the memorandum and articles of association as to be almost useless in providing any definition of what the body is about.

As is usual, lawyers are extremely cautious and they have given KDW the power to be a mining company, to be a farming company, to be a company doing almost anything in case by some stretch of imagination they might have to become involved marginally in one or other of these activities and find themselves otherwise declared to be ultra vires. The lawyers have put everything into the memorandum.

The Seanad and the Dáil are entitled to have an opportunity to discuss more precisely what KDW really is about. This Bill does not provide that in the form of precisely defined objectives which Senator Lanigan or Senator Dooge or other Senators could argue about, perhaps suggesting the addition or subtraction of various functions.

While I have not decided on introducing further legislation which would provide that, I can inform the House that an overall review is being undertaken of industrial development policy in general which will, of course, include KDW as an important element in industrial policy. I hope at the end that there will be legislation and I would hope that in that legislation it would be possible to give a more precise definition in legal, statutory terms of what KDW is about. I believe very strongly that it is not right for State companies to be in existence going on doing things, using public funds, without this House and the other House having an opportunity to say clearly whether the objectives are precise enough, what they are and then measuring performance against the declared objectives.

I also would like to see KDW obtain a larger proportion of their income from the sale of their services. We have been dealing here with the capital injection but there is also the current financing. In 1981 the grant-in-aid amounted to £688,000 and fee income to £136,000. In 1982 the grant-in-aid had gone up to £874,000 and it is estimated that income from fees will be in the region of £120,000, which is a decline as against the 1981 figure. This is not a trend that I would like to see continued; I would like to see the trend in the opposite direction and a larger proportion of KDW's income coming from fees and a lesser proportion from grant-in-aid. I would be interested in seeing KDW become actively involved in the export of their services and I welcome what Senator Lanigan had to say in this regard and his hope that KDW designs would be used in products originating and manufactured in Berlin, the location he mentioned. This would be a welcome trend which I would encourage.

Senator Lanigan also referred to agricultural design as being part of KDW's role and I assure him it is and will remain such. I omitted to mention it but it was just an omission and no more.

Notwithstanding my interest in history, I will not attempt to follow Senator Dooge in his analysis of our deficiencies in the plastic arts and the effect of colonialism on artistic development. I could not comment on it, but I think we have seen ample evidence here tonight of our highly developed linguistic artistry and our ability to manipulate words at great length. I will prove that we still have some plastic capability by sitting down on this seat.

Question put and agreed to.

Agreed to take remaining Stages today.