Mary White (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Ms Byrne for that. One could hear a pin drop in the room when she was speaking. I know Mr. Hugh Kelly from his oration at the Irish Exporters award gala dinner. He is an excellent public speaker. I thank them both; it was really fantastic. My colleagues and I are looking forward to working with them both and also with Mr. Simon McKeever.

When Connie Doody and I started Lir Chocolates in 1987 in no time at all we came up against this thing about the multinationals, particularly in the years from 1989 to 1992. Multinationals were paying huge salaries to people coming from the food industry and from universities. We could not compete with those salaries. I identify with Ms Byrne completely. I am talking about the late 1980s and 1990s. We could not compete with the salaries the multinationals were offering to food graduates.

The downside was that we were getting a second or third tier, who could not do it as Connie and I could do it. So we ended up doing all the key management functions ourselves because we could not afford to pay the high rates that the multinationals were paying to super-duper people. We had to do everything ourselves and that is why we had to work 24/7, but it was a pleasure.

I got a thrill seeing a person getting a job, thriving in it and developing social skills. I saw with my own eyes the human tragedy of unemployed people coming to us. There was huge unemployment then as we had up until recently. There was 40% unemployment in some parts of the country in the 1980s.

We ran a matriarchal company. We interacted with the staff. They worked as hard as we did. If we saw one who looked a bit tired we asked, "Do you want to go home?" We had a woman's way of doing it. That was the very positive aspect. However, we definitely could not recruit people into management functions who could do it as well as Connie and I could because we could not compete with the multinationals' salaries.