Foster's £15m Invest NI giveaway plan.

It's actually not a bad idea but the key is how long it can be rolled out for, keeping in mind that the FSA's worst case senario says a possible 12% unemployment and no immediate recovery until 2011. When I first read the headline I shuddered, left if for a couple of days and thought about.

For skills retention though it's the perfect plan, keep the jobs alive with grant funding. The same sort of thing has been happening in Europe for a little while now, it just makes sense to keep the skills wherever possible.

What you will see though are two discinct camps: businesses who are actively seeking new ventures, sales and avenues to explore and can utilise grant funding to keep staff and bring those ideas to reality... or businesses who are now using the whole downturn as a basic excuse to reign in cashflow, create redundancies with no real payout and run the whole show on a skeleton. It's not an easy balancing act to do but for once I think Invest NI are doing a good thing.