A senior team from Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) is in Kintyre to look at how local partnerships can work together to tackle the challenges facing the area.

Chief Executive Sandy Cumming, Chair William Roe and HIE’s Argyll team are met business and community leaders at a dinner last night (5th March) and are making a series of visits in Kintyre today.

William Roe, Chair of HIE, says: ‘We are delighted to be in Kintyre to explore with local people the issues affecting them. Partnership between government, business and representative bodies is very important in ensuring that we can effectively tackle the considerable challenges which still affect the area’.

As well as the business dinner at Craigard House Hotel, the HIE team is visiting Campbeltown Creamery to hear about its expansion plans, golfing complex Machrihanish Dunes (winner of the Best Sporting Facility Award in the ForArgyll 2008 Awards) and RAF Machrihanish – now for sale.

It seems odd that the team is not visiting the Vestas wind turbine complex, which would be, even pre-eminently, an obviously needy target. This omission can really only be interpreted one way – that the future of the plant must now be secured. If it were not, the HIE senior team would have had a serious need to engage with workers at the plant.

On the visit as a whole, Chief Executive Sandy Cumming commented: ‘This visit is part of a series of events which we are holding across the Highlands and Islands.  It is vital that at this time of global economic uncertainty we have the chance to speak first hand to our customers, partners and stakeholders’.

This sort of attention to the needs of Kintyre is very welcome. Bringing together this spectrum of expertise to familiarise itself with the area, the issues and very real potential has to be positive.