News Special Waterford Day 2: People forging ahead in region
He castigated the IDA’s job creation record in the area and gave them 30 days to come up with an employment action plan for the area.
Then this summer, he held a South-East Employment Forum in the city where he spoke of how since then another 30 jobs had been created at EirGen and 250 jobs at Eishtec, another call centre which recently won the customer services sales support contract for Orange Mobile.
Independent city councillor Mary Roche says while all jobs are to be welcomed, she is wary of over-reliance on call centre jobs as contracts can be pulled suddenly and then hundreds are let go. She would also have expected more out of a jobs drive spearheaded by the minister for jobs.
“But there is much to be positive about in Waterford. There is great work going on in the tourism sector in Waterford with Winterval, the museums etc, the festivals etc, and these have led to great new businesses around the Viking Quarter like the Kite Design Centre. But I think we have to be very careful about how we plot our future, to make sure it lasts. We need to create sustainable jobs,” she says.
Director of Caulfield SuperValu and former president of Waterford Chamber of Commerce, Anne Marie Caulfield agrees. “The tourism sector has undergone a significant enhancement but we also have some fantastic start-ups at WIT. I see them as the future. There are great growth opportunities from them. These companies in IT, biomedical and pharma will speak for the future.
“It’s great politically to have these 200 job announcements but the 10 and 30 jobs created by a start-up has longevity. These need continued support,” she said.
Waterford Institute of Technology has hothoused a lot of these companies. But therein lies another problem. Due to lobbying by universities scared of another attack on their already scant funding, it looks increasingly unlikely that WIT will get the university status that it has long sought.
Instead, it is now being nudged by Government towards a joint Carlow IT and WIT technological university status. Many in WIT don’t support this bid however and if anything would rather join up with a Dublin IT, which has greater status.
More of the South-East’s self-cannibalisation at play again?
But according to city manager Michael Walsh the university designation is “imperative”.
“Granting university status would be a recognition of the situation we are in and our need to transition into the knowledge economy.”
The future of the city, along with continuing to invest in tourism, lies in the knowledge economy, he believes, pointing to Bausch and Lomb, Teva Pharmaceuticals and Genzyme’s investment in the area.
However, outside the Government parties, Senator David Cullinane of Sinn Féin and Cllr Mary Roche have been doing groundwork on a project called “Doing it for Ourselves”.
They believe that the IDA and Enterprise Ireland don’t have a vested interest in selling the South-East whereas the individual local authorities of Kilkenny, Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford and Carlow do. They are arguing that, for instance, if each local authority were to put €50,000 towards a jobs creation unit and private companies were to pledge money too, the “people with the vested interest” could set about selling Waterford internationally themselves.
Mr Walsh says there’s no “silver bullet” however.
“I am working with the six regional city and county managers, looking at the various sectors and bringing forward actions. There is a commitment from the IDA and Enterprise Ireland to deliver. The forum convenes every six months and there are monthly and bimonthly low-level meetings.”
These forums, however, don’t bring any cheer to a family where nobody is earning and at serious risk of losing their home, says Gerard Arthurs, lecturer in international politics at WIT.
“You do have to understand the position the Government are in, however. They don’t own the cheque book now and it’s like trying to move a big sea liner, trying to turn around the economy in the South-East,” he said. “In the longer term, our future has to be in food and the agri-sciences as well as IT. We need to increase the number of small- and medium-sized enterprises working in the food sector and we need to get them exporting.
“We also need to foster entrepreneurial activity so people aren’t so reliant on ‘getting a job’. There are large increases in the numbers doing masters degrees in the South-East and too many of these only see opportunity overseas,” he said.
Without doubt the tourism sector has been Waterford’s big success in recent years. There were half a million people at the Tall Ships last year and 60,000 at the Harvest Festival, the festival which celebrated Irish food.
The downturn has forced the people of the city to really look at what they have and what they are failing to exploit.
Take the Theatre Royal, which has to be one of the city’s best kept secret. In 2009, it was renovated and is now one of the most elegant yet cosy theatres in the country. With egg shell blue walls, handmade wallpaper and an awe-inspiring Waterford Crystal Chandelier donated by the company in 1951, the auditorium is a traditional horse shoe shape, centred around the smallest stage in Ireland. The backdrop to the stage are the old city walls which were rebuilt using reclaimed stone.
The theatre is a wonderful mixture of the old and new and, according to marketing manager Oren Little, “is holding its own despite the downturn”.
Just next door sits the Bishops Palace, an ode to Waterford’s Georgian past while the Medieval Museum with its Choristers Hall is somewhere that you could get lost for hours. Kids too will love it.
So change is under way in Waterford. The people are forging ahead where they can. Whether the Government, IDA and Enterprise Ireland have the same commitment to the South-East, we will have to wait and see.
Whoever you talk to in Waterford, the mantra is always the same: It will be a DIY attitude that will help to resurrect the city.
Even the chairman of the Winterval festival, Barry Monaghan, got involved with the Christmas festival as he says he wants a vibrant Waterford for his children.
Andrea Galgey and Gillian Sauvage-Corcoran want the ‘Save Waterford’ campaign to play an important role in building the city’s future.
With the group having been set up due to disillusionment with the effectiveness of traditional politics, it has been running think-tanks at recent meetings. People attending the meetings have been divided into small groups and asked to brainstorm or provide their own ideas on how Waterford can get back to work.
Andrea said: “This is about seeing what we can do for the city and county so that our children won’t have to emigrate to find work. We might next look to see if we can work with local business, the chamber of commerce, etc, to see if we could have a Waterford card, a gift card that could be given to people in Waterford to spend in Waterford. That kind of thing. We want to look at innovative shop local initiatives. That makes all the difference.
“It’s not about us though. Save Waterford is about giving the people of Waterford a platform to come forward. It’s about the people, the community, and not just traditional politics, working together to save the city and county.”
‘Waterford Gives a Shirt’ sees its immediate future in keeping a close eye on the planned merger of Waterford city and county councils. Tomorrow, though, its campaigners will travel to the Dáil to present the thousands of shirts they have collected from Waterford people. “We will present shirts from the backs of Waterford citizens to our Government so they can see we have had enough and that we will no longer accept being the forgotten city,” said Liz Murphy.
“Aside from that, from then on, we will sit back and closely watch the legislation around the county merger. Our legal eagles will be working hard. We will also be seriously lobbying the implementation committee. They have a remit to implement this but how they will do it will concern us. There’s going to be a lot of research and lobbying as this merger will be a disaster for the city if it goes unchallenged.”
It all started with the opening of the Waterford Crystal Visitors Centre in the city centre two years ago.
It was an extraordinary feat to get the crystal tourists back to the county after the heartbreaking closure of the plant in 2009.
Internationally, and particularly in the US, Waterford means just one thing — crystal. During the height of Waterford Crystal’s reign, up to 300,000 tourists a year were visiting Kilbarry. This meant, to put it bluntly, Waterford’s tourism sector was Kilbarry. There was little else.
So in hindsight it was a no-brainer to try and keep them coming to the city if at all possible.
On the initiative of Waterford City Council, up to 180,000 such tourists are now coming into the city centre to see the visitor’s centre, complete with multimedia tour and the world’s largest Waterford Crystal shop. KPS Capital Partners, who now own Waterford, are renting the space from the city council.
A new continuous melt tank furnace is on site and produces two tonnes of molten crystal each day. Visitors can watch the world famous blowers in action. It’s estimated that up to 40,000 pieces of crystal will be made at the facility each year.
“It gave a huge boost to the Viking Triangle area of the city,” said Pádraig Ó Gríofa from ‘Waterford Gives A Shirt’. “Because of the numbers coming to the visitors centre, we have a fantastically renovated Victorian theatre, the Theatre Royal, the Bishop’s Palace Georgian Museum, which opened last year, and the just opened, built from scratch, Waterford Museum of Treasure all across the road.
“It’s incredible to see that things are beginning to work in the city. It’s leading now, with tourism, the festivals, like it never did in my lifetime. The city manager is doing a fantastic job and now they’re on about abolishing it and have a merger with the county council? It’s insane. It starts to work and they want to turn it off.”
Cllr Mary Roche agrees: “You know the Munster bar which is right bang beside City Hall across from Waterford Crystal? It was closed down for two years and you couldn’t give it way. Now they wouldn’t sell it for any money. It’s reopened under the same ownership and is booming. Visitors to the crystal centre and the museums are going for lunches. There are about five new cafes opened on the street alone. It has really worked.
It seems every five-bungalow village and crossroads seems to host a summer festival these days.
Waterford City is no exception. However, it has been raising its bar much higher and putting on world quality events such as the Tall Ships Festival last year which brought half a million people into the town and won it the Festival of the Year Award at the Excellence in Local Government Awards earlier this month.
There was so much going on in Waterford over those three days that it was hard to know where to start: food trails, culture trails, cultural fringe festivals, record attempts for the most pirates in one place. I could go on. And then there was the Harvest Festival which brought another 60,000 into the city and which showcased all that is good about Irish food.
According to Waterford City Councillor, Mary Roche the city is “now getting a reputation at being very good at putting on large- scale festivals”.
Therefore, there’s a lot of interest in the next big venture — Winterval, which the city is describing as Ireland’s Christmas festival.
The festival includes a 12 days of Christmas treasure hunt, an interactive re-creation of a Viking settlement, a Santa grotto in a 13th century chorister’s hall, and a hop on “Winterval Express” train that takes you on a half hour journey past the big Winterval attractions including the Giant Postbox and Carousel, the Giant Christmas Tree, The Bishop’s Palace, Theatre Royal, Santa’s Grotto, Reginald’s Tower, Winterval Christmas Market, the Animal Farm, and the Polish Christmas Village.
“The place will literally be transformed for Christmas,” said Ms Roche. “There’s been a huge investment in the festival. There will just be so much for families to do there. A helter-skelter slide by the Bishop’s Palace, new lighting, 60 new stands, so its market will rival a European festival. The Bishop’s Palace will also be showcasing what a Georgian Christmas would have been like. We’re planning on this being an annual event so we want it slamming this year so people will want to come back again and again.
These festivals are integral to rebranding Waterford from a dull industrial city into a weekend break city, according to its city manager, Michael Walsh.
“We’ve been trying to create a rejuvenated tourist product and it’s working. Arts, culture and festivals are a great way of expressing the rebirth of the city and expressing the culture that we have here but just hasn’t been showcased before.”
Waterford City sees its future as being transitioning from an industrial base to a knowledge economy one.
Small start-ups such as those at the Arclabs Research and Innovation Centre at Waterford Institute of Technology are seen as the key to the region developing an indigenous sustainable industry.
One such business is FeedHenry, a mobile apps business which now employs 30 people and was originally a spin-off from the Science Foundation Ireland-funded TSSG (Telecommunications, Software and Systems Group) based at WIT.
Having got investment from Angel Investment and Kernel Investment, it builds apps for enterprises, often allowing them to integrate their own internal systems onto mobile phones.
FeedHenry’s apps are cross platform, meaning they work on Apple and Android devices.
One of its clients is Aer Lingus. The airline’s mobile app was developed by FeedHenry and allowed the company to integrate its flight information database, customer booking system, flight disruption, and mobile check-in system into one customer-friendly interface.
“We tend to work on two types of projects: Companies who want an app for their own employees, containing information such as sales target performance data, or companies that already have desktop systems and want these to go mobile,” said FeedHenry chief technological officer Micheál Ó Foghlú.
When the business was incorporated, there were just 10 employees. Now there are 30, mostly in Waterford, with some in Dublin and the US. In the next year, the company intends hiring at least 10 more.
“Arclabs has given us a fantastic hi-tech base and WIT and Enterprise Ireland have been a huge support. There have been 10-15 spin-offs from TSSG,” said Mr Ó Foghlú.
“We’re trying to create an ICT culture in the region as compared to Cork, Galway or Limerick, it has been largely absent.
“There are some great new start-ups doing fantastic work out of Arclabs, such as ZolkC, which create fantastic handheld guides to museums, attractions, and historic sites.
“And then there’s Betapond, who run Facebook ad campaigns. The guys behind them were part of another start-up that collapsed but then they came back with this idea. It’s great to see talent and experience being recycled.”
Last month, FeedHenry was named a rising star in the 2012 Deloitte Technology Fast 50, a ranking of the 50 fastest growing tech companies in Ireland. Rankings are based on average percentage revenue growth over five years.
The rising star award recognises younger companies with the fastest growth in turnover over the past three years.
NEWS SPECIAL - The story behind the "Save Waterford" campaign
Comment: More work going on to secure future of Waterford than the public realise
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