18 December 1997: Further to the 20 November Weekly World News story on a new glass packaging plant in Northern Ireland, a Labour member of parliament for a constituency in Barnsley, in the north of E…
18 December 1997: Further to the 20 November Weekly World News story on a new glass packaging plant in Northern Ireland, a Labour member of parliament for a constituency in Barnsley, in the north of England, is asking the parliamentary ombudsman to investigate the UK 13 million government grant for the new plant. The member of parliament, Eric Illsley, whose constituency is home to the major UK glassmaker PLM Redfearn, believes the grant, approved by the Conservative government only a few months before it lost power to Tony Blair“s Labour Party, may have breached guidelines restricting governments to “essential and vital business” once an election is called. The UK 58-million Sean Quinn Group plant at Derrylin, South Fermanagh, due to open in mid-1998, was granted funding by the Northern Ireland Industrial Development Board (IDB) with the promise of 330 new jobs in a “socially-disadvantaged area”. British glassmakers and their trade association British Glass fear, however, that its opening will cause considerable job losses in other parts of the United Kingdom, where current overcapacity is estimated at around 10%. According to British Glass“s director-general Bill Cook: “For every new job in Northern Ireland, one will be going elsewhere. The IDB has resolutely ignored our advice all along that there is no room for the extra capacity.” “The plant will create vital jobs in an area with an extremely high unemployment rate,” said Sean Quinn himself. “Production capacity will actually be closer to 150-200,000 tonnes, not the 200-300,000 tonnes reported in recent newspaper articles,” he added.