Workers visibly shaken by news

ALTHOUGH the omens were bad for some time, Dell workers were visibly shaken by the scale of the job losses announced yesterday.

Daniel Higgins, aged 27 and his girlfriend Marie Daly, aged 23, were planning to get engaged and settle down together.

“Everything in our lives has now to be put back, maybe years,” Daniel said. “There is nothing job-wise out there. I still live at home in Rosbrien, and by the looks of things that’s the way it will be for some time as I cannot go and try and get a mortgage. I have a car loan which has to be paid off.”

Daniel, who has been working at Dell for nearly five years, said he earned around €400-a-week on a €10 an hour rate.

Aidan Tully aged 29 from Keys Park in Limerick has been working at Dell for over 10 years.

He said: “I have my own house and do not have a mortgage on it. A lot of the lads here have mortgages and car loans to pay back.

“My girlfriend and I had been planning to get married. Dell is a nice place to work, it’s more about the lads you work with than the job itself. All the speculation that had been going on had caused a lot of distress among the workers and destroyed the spirit inside the factory.

“A lot of people were feeling down for a while back. I now have no job and I will have to consider emigrating to Australia where I have cousins living.”

Sharon Kelly, 27, has worked at Dell for 10 years and has a big mortgage on her house at Byrne Avenue, Prospect, bought two years ago.

“I will now have to take it a step at a time. If it goes it goes. My boyfriend is working, but it going to be very hard. There is nothing I can do about it, but I will just have to manage. What can I do, there is a recession. I will just have to make the best of what I can do. Things are getting worse and worse. I blame quite a lot on the Government. The politicians seem to be only interested in lining their pockets,” she said.

Dominic McNamara, 21, from Garryowen joined Dell last summer having lost his job in the building industry.

He said: “My job in the buildings went belly up and now this is going belly up. I will have to see what way things go.”

Biggest loss

By Caroline O’Doherty

THE loss of 1,900 workers at Dell in Limerick is the greatest single jobs blow in modern times, dwarfing even the closure of the Ferenka plant in the city in 1977.

Ferenka, which employed 1,400 workers in the manufacture of steel cord for construction, had previously made the news for the kidnap of its managing director, Dutch industrialist Tiede Herrema, and its closure after protracted union battles thrust it back into the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

After that the dubious record of being the biggest jobs cut announcement went to the US-owned Seagate Technology computer disc manufacturers which pulled out of Clonmel, Co Tipperary, in 1998, leaving 1,500 workers on the dole.

But before then and since, there have been many dark days on the industrial front with firms that once employed thousands gradually whittling down their workforce. Dunlop in Cork had once had a four-figure workforce but even it was reduced over the years, the loss of the last 870 in one go in 1983 was still keenly felt.

The following year, the city lost the last 800 jobs at Ford, which had once employed 7,000.

Galway was left reeling from the closure of the Digital computer plant in the city in 1993 when 780 jobs vanished and Limerick suffered another serious blow in 1994 when the Wang computer plant closed with the loss of 600 jobs.

Gateway’s departure from Clonshaugh, Co Dublin, was one of the first shocks for the boom-time economy. The US-owned computer company’s decision to shut down 900 jobs in 2001 was a rude wake-up call.

Later that year, Macroom was left picking up the pieces from the loss of 670 jobs at General Semiconductor.

Over the past few years, some of the most devastating job cuts came from 3Com in Blanchardstown, Dublin which announced 600 job losses in 2003; Packard Electric in Tallaght, Dublin, 2004: 800 jobs; Fruit of the Loom, Donegal and Derry, 2004: the last 650 jobs of what was once a workforce of 3,500; Hospira, Donegal, 2005: 560 jobs.

In 2007, Xerox announced it would be cutting 900 jobs from its workforce of 1,700 over the following two years.