Unrecovered grants - Taxpayers’ money must be paid back

THE IDA has hard questions to answer in light of today’s revelation that six multinational companies which pulled out of Ireland in the past year have yet to repay their grants.

Nobody gets a cast-iron guarantee that a company which sets up in Ireland is here to stay. But the public has a right to expect that grants would be recovered immediately from hugely profitable multinationals.

The observation has special resonance when a company boasts annual profits of over $2 billion. A case in point concerns hi-tech group Celestica, which arrived in Ireland to a fanfare of trumpets in 1998, receiving a whopping IDA grant of over €3.6 million in the process.