Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy and join with him in expressing my regret at the news that jobs are to be lost at Molex in Shannon and Novartis in Cork. These are not connected. One is a pharmaceutical company and the other is in manufacturing and while the IDA had some advanced notice that there may be issues with Novartis, there was no prior awareness of job losses at Molex. This will be a big blow to both regions, Cork and the mid-west, and our thoughts are very much with the staff today, particularly as we begin the run-in to Christmas.

We have become so used to big job announcements that it is sometimes easy to forget that jobs can also be lost but that can happen, and that has happened in these cases. On a somewhat reassuring note, the jobs are not to be lost immediately and will be phased over a two-year period, through 2020 and 2021. That will give people who do not take up early retirement the opportunity to find alternative employment, of which there is much in those regions.

It will also give us and the IDA an opportunity, perhaps, to get a new investor or owner to come into Molex, in particular, and replace the jobs.

The Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Humphreys, has cancelled events so as to travel to Shannon this morning, where she is convening a meeting of the enterprise agencies, the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, members of the regional enterprise plan committee, the Shannon Chamber of Commerce, the local authority and other local stakeholders. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss how we can all work together, collectively across Government, State agencies and the private sector, to transition workers to new positions between now and the end of 2020, and what steps we can take to find a new investor for the Molex site. I want to assure the House that the Government will make every assistance available to the impacted employees in both companies. That includes benefits such as jobseeker's benefit, the back-to-education allowance for those who may go back to education, the back-to-enterprise allowance for those who may wish to set up their own business, as well as training opportunities and advice on redundancy entitlements and so on. All of that will be done.

I appreciate there have been calls for a task force. However, we already have a regional enterprise plan steering committee, which will be able to take on the role that a task force would have taken on in the past. We have done specific research on the impact of the recent US tariffs on EU trade and Ireland. I read it only a few days ago and I am not sure whether I am in a position to share it but if we are, we certainly will. When it comes to the US trade war, that is much harder to predict because we do not know yet the extent of it, what any tariffs will be or when or how it will end. It is a statement of the obvious, to which almost everyone in the House will agree, that free trade makes everyone better off in the round. It creates jobs and wealth and when there are restrictions on free trade through protectionism, it is not good for jobs or wealth. That is why it has always been the Government's position to be supportive of free trade, which we do, particularly, through our membership of the European Union and the trade deals the European Union makes.

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