Key decisions unlikely to be made in 2005

Business Opinion: As we look ahead into 2005, here are eight things that Business Opinion doubts we will see this year.

A new owner at Aer Lingus: The mess that the Minister for Transport Martin Cullen has got himself into over the hiring of a PR adviser does not bode well for Aer Lingus. If Mr Cullen survives he will be significantly weakened and unlikely to force through any initiative at Aer Lingus that does not have very broad support. In effect this gives the company's unions the whip hand, as they showed in the run-up to Christmas.

Given the robust good health that the company currently enjoys and the need to find and bed down a senior management team, it is hard to seen anything significant happening at a corporate level, even assuming the unions agree to it, which is a big assumption.

Implementation of the Enterprise Strategy Group recommendations: The report of the group set up in the autumn to review the Enterprise Strategy Group report is badly delayed. It is clear that a good number of its recommendations do not find favour with the mandarins on Kildare Street and elsewhere.

Alarms bells are ringing over the about-face on policy with respect to the enterprise agencies and the plans to chuck Government cash into the money pit that is small business's marketing budgets. Expect fudge and lots of it.

The abolition of any tax breaks: The Minister for Finance, Mr Cowen, promised a review of the various tax reliefs currently included in the tax codes as part of Budget 2005. The tender for consultants to carry out the review was sent out on Christmas Eve, which may give a false impression of urgency.

The ensuing report will no doubt be considered by an interdepartmental review group and probably end up in the hands of the tax strategy group that does much of the number crunching for the budget. Add to this the quite reasonable expectation that the consultants will find that many of the reliefs are quite a good idea, then the whole review begins to look like what it is: a budget day fig leaf in response to the very effective campaign waged by the Labour party and ICTU on the issue in the run-up to Budget 2005.

A review of the Groceries Order: The speed with which the Minister for Enterprise Trade & Employment, Mr Martin, moved to clarify the comments that he was going to review the ban on below-cost selling shows that the Government does not want to revisit this contentious topic.

The Competition Authority may see the Groceries Order as an affront to economics, but there are no guarantees that abolishing it will bring down the cost of anything. Why risk upsetting the powerful vested interests that support the ban - RGDATA, the IFA, backbenchers, etc - with inflation predicted at 2.1 per cent and an election in the offing?

The listing of Smurfit or any one else on the Irish Stock Market: This year there isn't even the sniff of a new recruit for the Dublin market. Smaller companies will continue to see the Alternative Investment Market in London as a more attractive option, given its lighter regulatory touch and dedicated band of followers. There are already 17 Irish companies on this market, which is quite significant when you consider that there are only 61 companies listed on the Dublin market.

The reflotation of Smurfit is the only significant prospect of any size, but the body language indicates that it could be 2006 before it returns and there is the real possibility that it will look to NASDAQ.

A significant mobile offering from Eircom: It is very hard to see Eircom making any significant move in this direction until the row brewing between ComReg and the two big mobile operators, Vodafone and O2, has ended. And if Eircom's own legal tussles with the regulator are any guide, this will take some time. Eircom's preferred strategy for re-entering the market is as a virtual network operator, but claims it has not yet been able to have a realistic discussion with either of the big players.

ComReg may have now ordered them to open up their networks. but there will be a few trips to Four Courts before the matter is settled. In the meantime Eircom can be expected to keep on banging away at rolling out broadband, which will allow it cobble together some sort of a growth story for investors as the dividends start to shrink.

Any winners in the Fyffes v DCC case: Barring the lawyers and other professionals involved, it is hard to see anyone coming out of this case unscathed. Both sides have already felt some pain and no little embarrassment in the first couple of weeks.

Tape-recorded conversations between Jim Flavin and Davy Stockbrokers appear to put the DCC chief executive at the heart of the controversial sale of its stake in Fyffes, while some tough cross-examination of David McCann, the Fyffes chief executive, has raised questions about whether the company was completely frank with its shareholders about trading prospects. With no settlement in sight, the case is expected to run until March, notwithstanding the very real prospect of an appeal.

Significantly more competition in the Irish banking market: Danske Bank, the new owners of National Irish Bank and Northern Bank, are talking a good game. But the suspicion must be that, given the full price they paid to get into the Irish market, they will be tempted to take their share, albeit small, of the profits available in what is arguably Europe's most profitable and least competitive financial services market.