Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I wish to raise an issue on which I am aware people have corresponded with you, Chairman, and on which I have also spoken to the clerk. There is a huge emphasis in the current climate on enterprise and doing everything we can within communities to help people create jobs, support jobs and job creation. People would have read in the national media in recent weeks about the most disgusting possible example of the use of the word “enterprise” to create a culture of junketeering, not just for members of a board but also their family relatives. I refer to the Wicklow Enterprise Park in my constituency which had a board stuffed full of county managers, former county managers, councillors and FÁS executives. They certainly like to travel.

The board spent two nights in Killarney at a cost of €17,000. Between 2005 and 2007, board members went on US junkets costing between €22,000 and €26,000 and, as much as I love Wicklow, when they visited the Kennedy Space Centre, Universal Studios and Disney World, I am not sure what they thought they would bring back to the county.

This would all be appalling but laughable to a degree if it were not for the fact that it drew down millions in State grants over a sustained period. It drew down grants from Pobal, FÁS, Enterprise Ireland and possibly from the Department of Social Protection. Pobal went in to carry out an audit on its funding and the Pobal chief executive wrote to me to say that he believes a comprehensive, in-depth review is required of all public funding accessed by the company but that such a review significant exceeded Pobal's scope so it wrote to the Department of Social Protection to advise it of that and requested the matter be brought to the attention of all relevant accounting officers and the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General.

There is obviously a specific issue concerning this so-called company but there is a broader issue about the checks and balances that were in place when money was doled out under the headings of enterprise, job creation or community support from a variety of State agencies and Departments over a period of time in the early 2000s. I am interested to know the Comptroller and Auditor General's perspective on this. Did that request ever arrive from the chief executive of Pobal? The committee should consider corresponding with the relevant accounting officers because we must be able to have faith in organisations involved in enterprise in our communities.

We do not need to see what we read in the Mail on Sunday, whereby people were writing to the University of Texas to beg for a visit and it took the manager of the Austen Technology Incubator to write back and say there is nothing magical about the physical location, it is just a set of run-down offices in a university building. He said that what was special about was what they did there and how they added value, and that was not observable on a visit. The FÁS executive who was on the board said that it does not look good and the letter from Austen makes progress in this area impossible.

This company brought together councillors, managers and FÁS executives and this was how they treated public funds. It is a serious issue both for Wicklow and in a much broader sense.