James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I come to the Chamber today directly from Leixlip where I was at Hewlett Packard for most of the morning talking to workers, talking to staff and talking to the various management who were available on site. I was disappointed to note I was the only Oireachtas Member on site. There were no Government representatives present. There is a scrum to get into job announcements and I was disappointed to see the same approach is not taken to job cuts.

As the Minister should be aware, this is a devastating blow to Kildare, to the local economy of north Kildare and to the areas of Leixlip, Maynooth, Celbridge, Naas and the wider hinterland. This is one of the key employers in north Kildare along with Intel, Pfizer, Kerry Foods and others and 500 job losses is a huge hammer blow to those workers and their families and to the wider local economy. As the House will be aware, for every ten jobs generated by FDI another seven are generated as a spin-off. No doubt the local economy will begin to suffer as well. Everything that can be done has to be done to support those workers to begin that process of retraining and re-skilling, if that is required, to support them and put the facilities of the State at their disposal. I would be interested in knowing what package is on the table in terms of supports for those workers, everything from social protection through to retraining through such support services.

The writing was on the wall for this one for some time. The restructuring - it was at HP at global level - was announced in November 2015 of HP Inc. and HP Enterprise. It was well understood globally that 3,000 to 4,000 jobs would be cut. If that was not enough of a signal, the CEO of Hewlett Packard globally, Ms Meg Whitman, speaking at the Davos forum last month, made an announcement, which made world headlines but, perhaps, not the Minister's attention, that jobs and humans would be put out of business by robots and automation. Advanced manufacturing is heading in this direction. That was a fairly strong signal and I would have thought the Department and the Minister would have engaged, even at that late stage, given the amount of signals that had been given, given the presence of HP in Ireland and given its critical importance not only to the local Kildare economy and those workers but to the wider national economy and our economic model.

I want to ask the Minister what engagement she had with HP management. Did the Minister meet them in Ireland? Did she meet them elsewhere, for example, in the United States? If not, why? What contacts had the Minister or her office this week, this month and over the past 12 months, in light of the announcement of November 2015? Given HP's significant footprint in Ireland, did the Minister take immediate steps to engage with the company? If so, could the Minister elaborate on those? What steps are now being taken, in terms of mitigation?

It strikes me this has happened previously. As the Minister will be aware, I represent north Kildare. Intel went through the exact same process approximately a year ago. Once can be forgiven, twice is careless. It is unforgivable. What kind of mitigation plan has the Government? What kind of crisis management is in place? Unfortunately, these situations occur. We need to be prepared for them. We need to have more than we are doing. What is being done?

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