Coughlan denies targets deleted from 2009 outlook

MINISTER FOR Enterprise, Trade and Employment Mary Coughlan has denied allegations that targets set for her department were deleted from a 2009 outlook statement because they were no longer achievable.

At an Oireachtas committee meeting yesterday, Fine Gael enterprise spokesman Leo Varadkar said “whole sections” of a draft version of the Department of Enterprise’s 2009 Annual Output Statement e-mailed to committee members had been deleted.

Mr Varadkar explained that the “tracked changes” function of the e-mailed document revealed that a number of targets for the department had been removed. The deleted targets did not appear in the final version of the statement circulated at yesterday’s meeting.

He asked whether this had been done because the targets had been “abandoned”.

“Insinuations that we changed the draft [document] to suit the department are incorrect,” Ms Coughlan responded, adding that the issue raised by Mr Varadkar was “superfluous”.

A colleague of the Minister told reporters that a 2008 version of the document had been used as a template for preparing this year’s statement, and that the deletions had simply been made in the course of updating the document.

One of the targets deleted from the document related to the time taken to process applications for statutory redundancy lump sums, Mr Varadkar said, adding that a target of four weeks had been specified in the original version of the document. He asked the Minister whether the target had been deleted because the department had failed to achieve it.

The Minister said the four-week processing time was a target for 2008, but, because of the “tsunami” of redundancy lump sum applications received last year, and so far this year, the target had to be revised.

The current target for processing applications is six- eight weeks. Staff have been redeployed from other areas of the department to the redundancy section in order to “manage the massive backlog”, the Minister said.