Mr. Tom Donnellan:

A number of months ago the belief was that Bord na Móna was coming to an end and it was going to lay off 2,000 employees and that it was going to leave at Christmas, that the pensions were going to be raided and there was no future for the midlands. The suggestion then was that we needed a Workplace Relations Commission forum to deal with all that. This is the first test of decarbonisation and we need a forum to deal with that. We have put in place a plan that means that is not going happen. There will be no compulsory redundancy and there will be redeployment, there is a company that is in growth, that is financially stable, the pensions are in a good place. We have an industrial relations mechanism for dealing that works well.

We, in Bord na Móna, do not see the upside of us being used as some sort of forum to determine how just transition issues are managed in the future. We have asked the unions what issues they want to discuss and they say they want to discuss pensions, what is happening with the third parties like the ESB, and security of employment. These are issues where the answers are clear and we can deal with them through the current industrial relations forums. We would have no issue with a wider forum to talk about just transition, like we have in the midlands with the county councils and all of the different stakeholders, but we do not see any upside to a Bord na Móna forum.