THE IDA yesterday rejected renewed criticism that its job creation efforts ignore the west, which it says is based on an incomplete analysis of its results for 1996.
A member of the Council for the West, Dr Seamas Caulfield, said the list of new projects announced by the IDA in 1996 showed an "unacceptable" bias in favour of Dublin. He was responding to a report in yesterday's Irish Times which said job creation in IDA assisted industries in the west rose faster than the national average last year.
The report was based on the actual number of new jobs filled during 1996, as opposed to job announcements for projects that may not come on stream for several years. The IDA's results for 1996 will be formally announced later today.
An IDA spokesman said Dr Caulfield's analysis was based only on those projects that were publicly announced last year. Only about 40 of the 207 new projects secured by the IDA were publicly announced, usually for political reasons or because of the size of individual projects, he said. "It is not a good basis for doing any analysis ... PR doesn't reflect the total picture at any one point in time. It is not a professional or scientific analysis of job trends."
The IDA recognised the regional imbalance in job creation and was trying to overcome it, the spokesman added. "We all recognise that the swing in manufacturing investment is still too much to the east coast. That is accepted at all levels within the IDA and there are efforts to try and redress that."
Dr Caulfield congratulated the IDA on its overall "outstanding" performance in attracting over 10,000 new jobs in projects announced last year. However, the results hid a "less laudatory record" which clearly showed the west was neglected in job creation.
"Apart from two new projects in Galway city involving 317 jobs, the remainder of the 39 projects and 10,000 jobs have gone into the Munster and Leinster area," he said. "Excluding the city of Galway, Connacht and Ulster, with over one sixth of the population of this State, have not benefited from the promise of a single new project job in the year of record new jobs."