A major jobs boost for Waterford is to be announced by the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, on a visit to the city today.
At least 400 jobs are to be created by a US biotechnology firm which is to occupy the plant vacated last year by Luxottica, the Italian manufacturer of Ray-Ban sunglasses.
Today's news is expected to be followed shortly by the announcement of a further 300 jobs at a new plant being opened on the city's IDA industrial estate by an Irish-US firm, Nypro Ltd, which manufactures and assembles products for clients under contract.
Both projects will provide welcome relief for a city which, as Ms Harney acknowledged earlier this year, has not capitalised fully on the economic boom.
The biotechnology firm taking over the old Luxottica plant, also on the IDA industrial estate, had been in negotiations for some time with the IDA, which was asked by Ms Harney in February to make Waterford a priority target for jobs.
At the same time she announced the establishment of a strategy group comprising business, trade union, local government and community representatives to identify the steps needed to bring more investment to the area.
The Ray-Bans plant was one of Waterford's biggest employers before Luxottica took it over in 1999. Its operations were gradually scaled down but its closure, with the loss of 90 jobs, in May last year was a blow to the city. The company had given assurances about its future just three months earlier, when 165 staff were laid off.
The Nypro jobs announcement is to be made by Enterprise Ireland. The company is a 50 per cent Irish-owned joint venture with Nypro Inc in the United States and employs more than 40 people at its plant in Bray, Co Wicklow. It purchased a 25,000-square-foot IDA advance factory in Waterford last September and the facility has since been extended.
Ms Harney said recently that with a highly skilled, readily available workforce from its institute of technology, and better-value housing relative to other cities, Waterford was an attractive location which should be doing better. She believed the city had not been "prioritised enough" and had raised this recently with the chief executive of the IDA, Mr Sean Dorgan.
A lot of the required infrastructure was now being put in place, such as the development of Belview port and the provision of an IDA technology park. "But it's not just as simple as that, I think there are other issues that have to be addressed." She wanted local people to put forward realistic proposals. "Sometimes plans are too ambitious and not realisable, and I want this strategy to be a realisable one."
A local demand for the IDA to have a regional director based full-time in the south east was one of the issues which would be examined, she said.
