There would be more than 1,000 jobs left in Fruit of the Loom in 1999, the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, said during a debate on the three-week closure of the textile company's operations in Donegal.

The temporary closure threatens 2,300 jobs, but the Minister rejected suggestions by local TDs that there would be fewer than 1,000 jobs left next year. Mr Dinny McGinley (FG, Donegal South West) said the company had acted disgracefully on the problem and cruelly towards its workers in Donegal. "It has been like Chinese water torture, administered on a drip-by-drip basis since last summer, and the company has not come clean with the workers yet."

He said they had been told there might be 700 to 800 redundancies shortly. He asked the Minister to confirm this was the extent of the redundancies, or could up to 1,500 jobs be lost, leaving fewer than 1,000 working in Fruit of the Loom in Donegal?

Ms Harney did not know the numbers of jobs to be lost. However, the T-shirt jobs - some 700 to 800 - were very vulnerable after Christmas.

She said Fruit of the Loom lost $488 million last year, shed thousands of jobs in the United States and moved to low-cost countries in the Caribbean and Mexico. In addition to Donegal, Fruit of the Loom was closing its operations in Northern Ireland and in Morocco for three weeks.

"The more jobs that are maintained by Fruit of the Loom the less grant money they will have to repay," Ms Harney said. "The more jobs they take out of Donegal the more grant money they will have to repay." She pointed out that Fruit of the Loom had received about £20 million to £21 million in grant aid over the past decade.

The deputy leader of Fine Gael, Mrs Nora Owen, asked for a clear, unequivocal statement about the job losses in the company and called on the Tanaiste to confirm what the Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation, the local TD, Dr McDaid, had said on radio, that only 1,200 jobs would be left in the company.

Mrs Owen put it that the Minister knew how many people would be left working there, but Ms Harney said that while she knew the nature of the package negotiated between the company and the IDA, she was not at liberty to reveal it.

The IDA had been in protracted discussions with the company in an effort to safeguard jobs and resolve all issues relating to grant liabilities arising from prospective job reductions, the Tanaiste added.

She believed a satisfactory package had been negotiated from the point of view of the workers, Donegal and the taxpayer, "although we wish it was a different package".