Dr. Peter Rigney:

Deputy Catherine Byrne made an important point on the broader issue of employment. One of the most pernicious effects of the property boom was that it made manufacturing unprofitable in areas surrounding large cities, not on the basis that the figures on production did not stack up but because companies were being offered incredible amounts of money to sell up. I dealt with a redundancy scenario in a company, which I am not at liberty to name, that moved operations to Warsaw, not because it was uneconomic to manufacture here but because it had received an offer from a property developer that it could not turn down. We were told that a very generous redundancy offer would be made. Deputy Byrne referred to the Lyons Tea site on Davitt Road in Inchicore, which is now a wasteland. That is a further pernicious aspect of the property boom.