Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

----- so the Deputy should bear that in mind before making a statement that could potentially result in Sinn Féin handing out a massive compensation payment. Community employment, CE, companies are not-for-profit, voluntary-based entities and I am not trying to suggest that CE companies are the same as Tesco or Aldi. The point I am making about private companies is that they are not inherently a bad thing. Private enterprise is not inherently bad and lots of Government and public services are provided by entities that are established as private companies. In the way the Deputy speaks sometimes, he makes out that he thinks it is inherently wrong for the Government to deliver any service through private enterprise yet, across the board, we do this very successfully. We do it in health care through GPs and primary care centres and in so many other fields. That is the point I was making. Turas Nua, for instance, has two shareholders, one is a not-for-profit, the other is for-profit, so it might be disingenuous to talk about the companies as being for-profit.

On redundancy and insolvency, we do pursue those companies for repayments. I believe we got back over €10 million in redundancy payments last year from companies, which is good but where we have to do write-offs is for obvious reasons. Companies exist in law, they have legal personality and where they cease to exist they can no longer be pursued, any more than one could pursue someone for fraud after they had passed away. One cannot pursue a company that no longer exists. If one looks at the trading status currently of the companies which are listed as owing the Department money, 36% have been liquidated, 20% dissolved, 1% struck off, 6% in receivership but about 37% are still classified as normal. While those companies continue to exist as a legal entity it does not mean that they are still trading but we will still pursue them if we can.