NEWTON'S OPTIC/NEWTON EMERSON: The 24 people laid off last week in Tipperary by Taylor Made Glass, which makes windscreens for speedboats, face a bleak financial future. That is why it is vital to support Combat Poverty Glazing, the new agency set up to employ 24 people in Tipperary.
Modelled on the highly successful Combat Poverty Agency, which employs 20 people in Dublin, Combat Poverty Glazing provides the Department of Social and Boating Affairs with advice and reports on the speedboat windscreen sector.
Despite a decade of economic growth, many people in Ireland are still excluded from speedboat ownership and many more experience relatively dirty windscreens due to salt spray, engine grime and neo-liberal seagulls.
Taylor Made Glass laid off its workers because of falling demand and rising competition. This will never be a problem for Combat Poverty Glazing. Over the past 22 years, as poverty steadily fell, the Combat Poverty Agency's budget steadily increased to €6 million, including a €2 million annual wage bill. In 2002, the Office for Social Inclusion was set up by the same department to cover the same function, yet somehow this only made the Combat Poverty Agency even more essential.
Therefore, as speedboat windscreen demand falls, Combat Poverty Glazing can expect its funding to grow. If another company enters the market offering exactly the same product, Combat Poverty Glazing must be protected at all costs, or at least at a cost of €6 million a year.
None of this should arouse any suspicion from the taxpayer as Combat Poverty Glazing guarantees complete transparency. Surplus speedboat windscreens can be stored at a decentralised location where the Minister might look through them eventually.
Combat Poverty Glazing does not produce any speedboat windscreens itself, despite costing more to run than a Russian oligarch's yacht. However, it does produce a great deal of valuable material about speedboat windscreen issues. Recent groundbreaking reports include Behind the Break-wall: Life in the Inner Harbour, The Toughened Glass Floor: Staying Afloat Come Hell or High Water and the seminal Inboard, Outboard and Overboard: Why our Propeller-heads Need a Separate Board. Many of these reports have moved their readers to tears.
Given the significance of Combat Poverty Glazing's work, the Government must be strongly discouraged from merging it with the Left-Wing Mirror Authority and the Polarised Spectacles Unit. This proposal is driven by short-sightedness and the political agenda of people who have no concern for speedboat owners, such as canoeists and windsurfers.
The importance of Combat Poverty Glazing cannot be overstated, especially by people who work there and elsewhere in the marine glass quango community. It has raised awareness of speedboat windscreens among people who were not aware that speedboats had windscreens.
It has demonstrated Ireland's commitment to the EU goal of standardised speedboat windscreens, almost certainly preventing our expulsion from Europe; as any trip to Cannes will confirm, Europeans take their speedboats very seriously.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Combat Poverty Glazing contributes directly to the safety of the western world. How many times would James Bond have been killed, or at least temporarily blinded, without an effective speedboat windscreen?
For all these reasons, plus any more it can think of, Combat Poverty Glazing must not be abolished. Anyone who would even contemplate such a thing is clearly a cynical monster.