My husband lost his job, as head of maintenance, along with all 112 other employees at the Warner's lingerie factory in Belmullet last week.
Sad but hardly devastating in an economy like ours, you might say. And anyhow, why didn't they see it coming? The world doesn't owe anybody a living, you know - you have to get out there and grab it.
Getting out there and grabbing it, however, when you live in Erris, in the north-west corner of Mayo, isn't always a realistic option, which is why organisations like Udaras na Gaeltachta exist.
Located in the Gaeltacht, Belmullet has an Udaras office which offers grant aid as an incentive to industries setting up in the area, on the understanding they will promote and preserve the linguistic and cultural integrity of the place and its people. A complex and obscure power structure, lack of communication and a lack of co-ordination between Udaras and other Government agencies have resulted in extraordinary inertia when considering alternatives for a skilled workforce made redundant.
The closure of Warner's on August 1st, where about 90 per cent of the workers were women, will have devastating consequences for this remote rural community. The region of Erris has a population of 10,000, spread over an area of 250,000 acres. Belmullet itself has a population of about 1,200. The loss of Warner's is the loss of the biggest employer in Erris.
On top of the inevitable economic difficulties this situation creates, the social effects are going to be hardest to bear. The younger sector of the workforce will find work elsewhere, draining the local economy and upsetting the social balance still further.
For older women whose ties to the area involve children, husbands, elderly relatives or mortgages, the prospects are still less favourable. Several of the women over 40, who made up about 30 per cent of the workforce, have expressed very real fears they will not work again. Unemployment in the area is estimated at 26 per cent; that is six times the national average. Ballina and Castlebar are the two nearest towns with any likelihood of providing employment. Both are over 40 miles away.
The first question that has to be asked is: was this closure predictable; and, if so, was any provision made to manage its effects? The answer to the first half of the question has to be yes. The plight of the Fruit of the Loom factories in Donegal should have stood as a warning to those dealing at an organisational level with representatives of the clothing industry in Ireland. It has been apparent for a number of years that the rag trade is moving its production to where labour is cheap - countries like Morocco, Mexico and Costa Rica.
Warner's announced only three months or so ago that workers in its Nottingham plant faced 87 redundancies out of a workforce of 130. Even more recently, at Keady in Co Armagh, in one of its two factories operating in the North the workforce was reduced from 200 to 154. The group's factory at Dromore in Co Down employs 115 and no redundancies have been announced there.
Udaras na Gaeltachta, which had negotiated the original lease of the Belmullet factory to Warner's, might have suspected there was some cause for concern last October when the initial 10-year lease expired. Instead of preparing to renew it on a yearly basis, the Warner's representative managed to negotiate a series of three-monthly extensions - hardly inspiring confidence in long-term prospects. Another indication that some preparation for alternative employment might have been appropriate was that Warner's, which has been in the town for almost 11 years, employed about 230 people until five years ago. This number was down to 113 when it closed last week - a good indication Warner's was running out of a future.
But what did Udaras, or indeed any local public representatives, do with this knowledge? It was a shock and a disappointment to workers that no Udaras representative was present during the announcement of the closure last week.
When Udaras did send someone to meet a committee set up by the workers a few days later, the agenda was completely open and workers were asked to suggest ideas for a possible future for the factory. There should have been an acknowledgement that this was a crisis for the area. A contingency plan should have been prepared.
Udaras did offer FAS courses to workers but indicated it was unlikely a replacement industry could be secured within a year due to inadequacies in local infrastructure. Erris, at a distance of some 200 miles, is about as remote as you can get from Dublin. Investment in infrastructure - roads, rail links, telecommunications networks, and, more basically, waste management facilities - is sorely inadequate.
One response to Warner's closure has been the setting up of a task force including Udaras, the IDA and Mayo County Council to look into the infrastructure needs of the area. this could have been done a year before. Isn't this why the north-west still has Area One status according to the EU - so infrastructure needs can be addressed? Why was this survey left until now?
The workers had expected that Udaras would have put some thought, at least, into the possibility Warner's might close. In the preceding months, members of the workforce had expressed deep concern at the lack of security implicit in the new short-lease agreements, both to Warner's management staff and in two letters to the Udaras board. Nobody seems to have acted on these concerns. The question arises as to how much freedom Udaras had to respond.
There are contradictory messages when it comes to Udaras's ability to attract alternative industries to the area. Udaras gets "the crumbs from the table", in the words of one member of the board, referring to its relationship with the IDA. On the other hand, Gaeltacht Minister Mr O Cuiv has publicly stated that Udaras is "not a Cinderella organisation".
Whatever Udaras is not, its role as an agency for the prevention of rural depopulation must be seriously questioned.
What Erris has is all the natural beauty of a still relatively unspoilt area on the western seaboard. It has the advantages and disadvantages of a marginalised area - advantages which are all too often forgotten or ignored: a low crime rate, a high standard of community awareness, a high sense of family responsibility. Rural values which are almost forgotten elsewhere still exist here: kindness and courtesy to strangers, extreme generosity without thought for recompense, and a strong sense of community values.
These values won't exist for much longer if the youth of the area leave because all that will remain will be a skeleton community, artificially inflated by tourists and returnees in the short summer season and depleted, depressed and deprived for the rest of the year.
The younger women, on the whole, do not want to leave. They have emotional ties which bind them to the area and a sense of belonging here which is as rare now as it was once commonplace. The workers are interested in an industry which will use their skills and develop them, an industry which will not quickly disappear into the cheap labour markets of developing countries as soon as it has established a reputation for quality.
There has to be a movement into new industries, whether cottage teleworking or technological production. But the move must carry the workforce with it, provide channels for organisation and communication, and not just pull the rug out from under our feet.
