Plant closures are all too familiar, writes Chris Dooley, Industry and Employment Correspondent
While many of us wonder how much longer the economic boom can last, the people of Donegal could be forgiven for asking a different question: when is it going to arrive?
Yesterday's announcement by US pharmaceuticals firm Hospira that it is to close its Donegal town plant with the loss of 560 jobs extends an all-too familiar pattern.
For the past several years, Donegal has been hit with one such setback after another. Last year, for example, Fruit of the Loom, which had once employed 2,500 people in its Donegal and Derry textile plants, began a final wind-down of its Irish operations.
Another textile firm, Unifi, closed its Letterkenny plant last autumn with the loss of 300 jobs.This followed 125 redundancies at the same plant the previous April and 235 redundancies a year before that.
According to one estimate, Donegal has lost 5,000 jobs in the textiles sector alone over the past eight years, in firms such as Fruit of the Loom, Unifi, Comer Yarns Ltd, Nena Models, Herdmans and the Donegal Shirt Company. Nearly all those jobs were based in the north of the county, many on the remote Inishowen Peninsula.
The fact that yesterday's announcement concerned a medical supplies company based in the south of the county makes it, if anything, all the more disturbing.
As Shauna McClenaghan, manager of the Inishowen Partnership company said, it was "really scary" that a pharmaceuticals plant had suffered the same fate as so many textiles factories before it. The expectation, she explained, had been that the more high-tech pharmaceuticals jobs offered more security than traditional manufacturing employment.
There was also no doubt, she added, that job losses in south Donegal would have a knock-on negative impact on other areas of the county.
"There will be a concentration now on replacing those jobs in the south, and it's only correct that that effort should be made. But it will increase the sense of isolation felt in the north of the county."
Through her work with the partnership company, Ms McClenaghan has witnessed at first hand the efforts by former textile workers to recover from the loss of their jobs. There is now a realisation, she says, that large-scale employment is unlikely to return to the area. As a result, many of those who had been made redundant had now become self-employed.
A large proportion are contractors in the construction industry and can be seen leaving the peninsula with their vans on a Sunday evening to work in the south, returning on a Friday evening.
Many women were also assisted in starting their own businesses through a programme run by the partnership company called Even (Every Women Valued Equally in the Northwest).
The reality, however, is that for many of those who have lost their jobs in Donegal, finding alternative work has proved impossible.
Margaret Bell, who worked as a sewing-machinist at Fruit of the Loom's Buncrana plant for 24 years, is still looking for regular employment four years after being made redundant.
She has been through numerous training courses, some financed by herself and others by State agencies. She estimates that about 60 per cent of her former colleagues are in the same position. A glance at the live register figures for each county confirms that Ms Bell and her former co-workers already know, relative to other areas, Donegal is an unemployment blackspot.
In July 9,516 people were "signing on" in the county, only 1,400 fewer than in the entire midlands region, comprising Laois, Offaly, Longford and Westmeath.
An Enterprise Ireland spokesman pointed out that the unemployment rate in Donegal is coming down and that heavy investment in indigenous local industry is paying dividends.
IDA Ireland, too, says it is giving priority attention to the county.
It recently supported the creation of 123 new jobs at Sita's software operation in Letterkenny.
That was the first IDA announcement for Donegal, however, since 2002.
If Donegal is ever to experience that economic boom, Minister for Enterprise Micheál Martin will have to deliver on his promise yesterday to mobilise the "full resources" of State agencies to address the county's problems.