Compaq’s nuclear links threaten its State subsidies
Yesterday, the Irish Examiner published evidence from confidential company documents revealing a Compaq division called the High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) group is exporting software crucial to the French and US nuclear weapons programmes.
The work involved computer design and the production of operating software for some of the world’s largest computers used for the simulated testing of nuclear weapons.
Michael Greene, head of the Department of Enterprise’s military export control system said the revelations raise serious questions. “We have asked them formally to clarify about the goods going outside the EU. If the company was aware they were destined for use in weapons of mass destruction, then they had a duty to inform us and we would have decided whether we felt a licence was required,” he said.
Compaq yesterday confirmed a letter had been received from the Department of Enterprise asking for clarification of the group’s work. The company said it would respond to the department’s questions but declined to discuss the remainder of the department’s letter which included inquiries about possible breaches of European export law and the end use of Compaq’s software products.
Compaq, taken over by Hewlett Packard in May, has to date received over 8m in Government IDA grants, over 1m of which went to the firm’s Galway facility.
IDA spokesperson Colm Donlon said grant aid would be withdrawn if Compaq acted outside the export laws.
“It’s for the Government to determine the business rules in Ireland, not the IDA. But if a company doesn’t operate within the laws of the land grant aid would be refused,” said Mr Donlon, adding that aid would be withheld until such time as a company stopped acting illegally.
However, Mr Donlon said the IDA had no problem in principle with supporting companies making military-related goods. “All these major companies have products connected to the arms trade. They all grew at some stage through the arms trade and there’s nothing wrong with that as far as we are concerned,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Department of Enterprise said yesterday it is to ask Forfás to conduct a complete review of the Government’s military and dual use export licensing system. Forfás is the National Policy and Advisory Board for Enterprise, Trade, Science, Technology & Innovation
“We’ll be looking at the whole area of gaps in exports including brokering, licensed production overseas - areas we have little or no control over,” said Mr Greene. Responding to Amnesty International’s criticism that information on Ireland’s military and dual use exports is not transparent enough to show the true extent of Ireland’s arms trade involvement, Mr Greene said: “We’ve been doing that and hopefully in the next two weeks we’ll be putting up what we think is a more transparent set of statistics as to what the goods are and their end use.”
