Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke said he could not provide reassurances to employees in Aughinish Alumina in Co Limerick about the future of their jobs.<\/p>\n
Asked if he could give guarantees to workers he said: “Obviously it is a very challenging circumstance. The company is still operating. At the moment no decision has been taken”.<\/p>\n
“I can’t give any reassurances in any regard. This is a European issue,” Mr Burke said.<\/p>\n
“Europe has policy responsibility for sanctions we must remember that. And they have to take a very significant decision in that regard,” he added.<\/p>\n
The Department of Enterprise is investigating whether Russian-owned Aughinish Alumina, which is an alumina refinery, is making products which is ending up in Russian military equipment.<\/p>\n
“Critically, Ireland had supported ‘Ukraine first’ in 20 packages of sanctions against Russia,” the Minister said.<\/p>\n
He said there were about 1,000 workers in the company’s supply chain and about 900 more in the wider economy.<\/p>\n
“But we all meet challenges and we have to respond to those challenges with our values at our core as a country,” he said.<\/p>\n
“That is very important to me as a minister – Ireland\u2019s reputation. We have to work to try to respond to this collectively as the European Union,” he added.<\/p>\n
The Minister said the investigation would try to ascertain the facts and stress test them.<\/p>\n
He added the Department was working through what threshold of evidence it could reach in its investigation.<\/p>\n
He said he expected the report from the Department imminently.<\/p>\n
Minister Burke was speaking to journalists at the fringes of informal meeting of EU competition ministers in Dublin Castle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke said he could not provide reassurances to employees in Aughinish Alumina in Co…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-542583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}