Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Five hundred workers and their families had to find out through the media, the television etc. that their jobs had been lost. These workers are from Kildare and west Dublin and many are from my constituency and other Dublin constituencies and around Leinster in general.

What this brings centre stage again is the massive unique dependency of this country on American-owned foreign direct investment to create employment and the lack of any native industrial policy. As a result, 20 out of 25 companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange as companies in Ireland are not Irish companies, 40 American companies account for two thirds of the value of Irish exports and one in five private sector jobs is now IDA Ireland supported through foreign direct investment.

Hewlett Packard is also one of the top two technology companies being investigated in the US Senate for tax avoidance on a massive scale. Obviously, much of this is connected with Ireland.

In total, 100% of its cash reserves are kept out of America, which is even more than in the case of Microsoft or Apple. Loans from its companies abroad subsidise its US operations. The Minister says she has daily contact with the IDA, so perhaps she can answer my questions about the largesse Hewlett Packard has enjoyed from the Irish State and the Irish taxpayer since it came here. How much grant aid has Hewlett Packard received since it located here? How many higher capital and employment grants for locating outside Dublin, for which there is a higher rate, has it received from the IDA? What level of corporation tax is Hewlett Packard paying in this country, when its workers are paying PRSI, pension contributions and so forth? How many high-level Hewlett Packard executives were given State appointments by Fine Gael or the Labour Party in recent years? The reason I ask that question is that in February 2012 Hewlett Packard and the IDA announced 150 Hewlett Packard jobs supported by the IDA in Galway and Leixlip. How many of these jobs were given IDA grants to bring them to this country in the first place? Even if they were not, Hewlett Packard is getting huge assistance from the State for other jobs. In April 2011, another 50 jobs in the cloud services innovation centre in Galway were supported by the IDA.

Hewlett Packard is high on the IDA's list of companies that got grants in 2015. It got the third highest amount of IDA grant aid in 1997. Its profits were $2.7 billion last year. There is no need for these workers to suffer in this way. Many of the company's top executives have been feted by the Irish establishment, as well as receiving appointments within the IDA and in many other places.

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