With its low value-added production, highly-competitive global market and troubled parent company, some say Krups's Limerick operation never stood a chance of making it into the 21st century.
True, the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, and the chief executive of IDA Ireland, Mr Kieran McGowan, held a series of desperate and clandestine meetings with Moulinex in May, but even they knew the objective was damage-limitation.
It appears the Limerick plant has not been profitable for many years. Before Moulinex bought Krups in 1991, the company had been trying for many years to crack the North American appliances market. The Limerick factory played a part in this move, manufacturing parts and products to be shipped across the Atlantic.
But while the company was a major player in the coffee-machine market across Europe, it floundered in the US. There, the appliances market was highly comp etitive, and products had to be priced very low. Krup's US volumes rose but, apart from a lucky break through currency fluctuations, significant profits never followed.
One source said last night that Krups was close to bankruptcy when it was sold to Moulinex. "Krups was in bad shape. It was a very old-fashioned and badly run company. Moulinex got it and never really put it together. Moulinex are now on their third change of senior management, so they are a company in a bit of a crisis, too."
While the Limerick plant was not economic in 1991, the source added, Moulinex hoped it could in time turn it round. But it failed. In April Moulinex approached IDA Ireland, saying it was in serious difficulties and was considering closing both its plant in Limerick and the Thurles operation it runs on behalf of itself, Glen Dimplex and the Irish Sugar Company.
It already had plans to lay of 3,100 workers in France and Germany, and was worried about the direction sales had taken in Russia and the Far East.
By May, with the Russian and Asian economies in free fall, anaiste, Ms Harney and the IDA Ireland delegation, led by Mr McGowan, were on their way to Paris for crisis meetings with Moulinex management. They persuaded the firm to consolidate and if necessary upgrade the Thurles plant, and use its considerable property assets at Limerick to give workers there a decent redundancy package.
Sources within the IDA say things for low-tech manufacturing industry will get worse and worse, and there is not much the agency can do about it. Low-cost labour economies in a global market-place will continue to drive prices down, and ultimately drive more and more multinational manufacturing firms to relocate.
So far this year the Republic has lost 5,000 such jobs; the IDA expects to lose 6,000 in 1999.
But industrial strategy is firmly focused on high-value manufacturing and services, as well as on research and development. The IDA has already this year generated 5,300 jobs in Limerick; it says the challenge now is to retrain Krups workers.
"The issue really is not so much whether the jobs are available. It's whether the workers put the effort into reskilling themselves and adapting to modern industry," an IDA source said.