Govt pledges support to axed textile workers

The Government today claimed it would fully support almost 300 people who are to lose their jobs with the closure of a textile factory in Donegal.

Tánaiste Mary Harney said all the relevant state agencies were working to attract more investment into the county and would offer retraining to those made redundant at the Unifi plant in Letterkenny.

The US company has said continuing losses are to blame for the planned closure of the polyester yarn manufacturing facility in October.

The decision is the latest blow to the town which has already suffered 500 job losses at the plant, and the embattled textile industry which has seen 6,000 redundancies in the last 10 years.

Ms Harney insisted the Government was doing all it could to help the industry and the area.

Ms Harney said she was shocked by the closure because the IDA and her department had been working with the company on a restructuring project since it announced it was to shed 120 jobs in March.

“We certainly felt that restructuring package had a longer lifespan than merely four months and that’s what really surprised me,” she told RTE radio.

Bill Lowe, the Chief Operations and Financial Manager of Unifi Inc, said the move was regrettable but necessary.

“This facility has operated at a loss for a number of years now and as we’ve made a restructuring in March to attempt to get it back in the profitable range, we’ve determined with a lot of effort that we were not able to do so,” he said.

“The projection is continued losses going forward and so regrettably we had to make the decision to close it down.”