Irish competitiveness - Accept the cuts or lose everything

EVEN though the writing was on the wall since the day workers at the Raheen plant in Limerick started training their Polish successors to run the new €200 million Dell plant in Lodz, yesterday’s announcement that 1,900 jobs, and anything up to another 10,000 downstream jobs are to go, is a huge body blow to our economy and our country’s badly shaken confidence.

The inevitable announcement, following so closely on grim news from Waterford Crystal, Tara Mines and so many other businesses, could not have come at a worse time for the workers or the country.

It undermines too our notion of what we thought we had become. We wanted to believe that we had evolved into an adult economy where good jobs can be secured by being exemplary employees, by providing attractive government supports and by being reliable, hard-working, English-speaking Europeans.