Pat Carey (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)

Letters have been exchanged between the parties — between legal representatives for the companies involved and the European Commission and our Department. Correspondence was received by our Department a number of weeks ago. That most recent correspondence from the Commission has been responded to and we in the Department are waiting for the Commission's response to it. Our Department is confident that the position it has taken on the cohesion process will be vindicated but we await the outcome of that.

In the meantime, as I stated earlier and in my reply, the cohesion companies are in a position to wind up and complete existing programmes which had been in place under the current national development plan and we believe that it will be possible to roll out the new programme fairly expeditiously once this issue has been resolved.

On loss of jobs or redeployment, as each company is a separate company it is largely in the hands of those companies. It would be naive to suggest that there would not be at least some redundancies involved but it is too early to say yet what the extent of those will be.

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