Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

The details of Enterprise Ireland's expenditure over the past five years on its current headquarters in Glasnevin in order to meet both its business needs and health and safety obligations is an operational matter for Enterprise Ireland and not one in which I have a function.

However, I understand from Enterprise Ireland that, in the period 2001-06, it spent €6.6 million on redevelopments on its Glasnevin site. This expenditure was committed well in advance of the Government decision to decentralise and was necessitated by the organisation's business needs. These included the need to accommodate the move from certain laboratory based activities to increasingly office based activities, the need to upgrade older buildings in order to meet health and safety considerations and the need to realign staff between buildings to meet the organisation's demanding strategic plan targets. This expenditure is split between expenditure on Technology House, which amounts to €4.5 million, and expenditure on the Materials Building, which amounts to €1.6 million. Enterprise Ireland also spent a further €640,000 on site consolidation and is now in possession of a very valuable asset which can be sold following the move to Eastpoint Business Park. The bulk of this expenditure took place in the period 2001 to 2003. Enterprise Ireland signed the lease in September 2006 for a single site Dublin office in Eastpoint Business Park in order to relocate its Dublin-based staff from its current four Dublin locations. The cost of this lease amounts to €2.9 million per annum.

The decision to relocate to Eastpoint was made in order to meet the business needs of the agency. Currently, Enterprise Ireland occupies four office locations in Dublin, primarily as a result of the amalgamation of various State agencies over a number of years into a single organisation to support indigenous enterprise. The lease on two of these buildings will expire in the fourth quarter of 2008, necessitating the move to a single site.

From an operational perspective, occupying four separate locations in Dublin was suboptimal, especially for an agency mandated to provide a range of services and expertise across several critical business functions in a holistic fashion. Crucially, having all Dublin based-agency staff in one location will enable Enterprise Ireland to further deliver on one of its most important new initiatives, namely, the creation of integrated teams of staff with complementary expertise to service client companies. Locating Dublin- based staff in a single location will significantly increase the level of collaboration within the organisation which will enable Enterprise Ireland to deliver a more effective service to client companies.

The move to Eastpoint will enable the agency to sell the majority of its valuable site in Glasnevin, while also enabling the National Standards Authority of Ireland to temporarily relocate from existing substandard accommodation which is causing health and safety problems to one of the buildings on the site which has already been refurbished by Enterprise Ireland, namely, the Materials Building. This move does not in any way impact on the National Standards Authority of Ireland's decentralisation process.

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