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The city of Limerick has taken a serious blow in this economic crisis.

1,900 jobs will be leaving here and moving to their new plant in Poland.

Dell to cut 1,900 jobs at Limerick operation - The Irish Times - Thu, Jan 08, 2009

I'm afraid it is the sign of the times. What goes up must come down and down and down. Unemployment is set to hit double digits in the US before this is over.

It will happen It already is on a small level. I live 15 minutes from the boarder if they could get the drugs lord and street killing controlled more would be going to work in Mexico.

[QUOTE]When are Americans going to be crossing the Mexican border looking for jobs?[/QUOTE]

Yeah, we knew this was coming in Ireland, but for a country the size of ours, this is really, really bad news. It was Waterford Crystal yesterday. Especially for Limerick, Dell going is a disaster as it was a very good plant, with good jobs, and there are thousands of other jobs dependent on the Jobs in Dell and the existence of the factory. I'm afraid things aren't going to get any easier for a while either, but hopefully we will come through this bad time, just as we have come through bad times in the past.

This is pessimism run rampant. What we need is forward thinking. What can Northern Ireland do that nobody else can?

I have one answer at least.

They can put the construction of offshore wind turbines into one side of the huge space available and re-open the Harland and Wolff shipyard. Not to tender for current shipping orders, no, the Koreans would undercut them. What can Harland and Wolff do that nobody else could? They could rebuild the classic liners of yesteryear for tourists to cross the Atlantic in. Just like last time, the rich will pay a fortune and the unemployed can go one way for ten euros each.

There's space in the yards to employ all those Dell enquiry line operators and a few more besides. They can re-learn the hammering of red-hot rivets and within a year we'd see the old familiar outlines of the Canberra, the Britannic, the Olympic, the Glorious (for specialist cruises), the Titanic... perhaps two Titanics, why not, that would be the most popular ship to travel on. Lightning never strikes twice.

I'll start it rolling by offering here, now, to take a stateroom on the first public sailing of the first Titanic out of Belfast in the twenty first century. Line up, place your pledges, it'll be an economic miracle and we'll cancel the imminent depression in days.

spot;1104850 wrote: This is pessimism run rampant. What we need is forward thinking. What can Northern Ireland do that nobody else can?

I have one answer at least.

They can put the construction of offshore wind turbines into one side of the huge space available and re-open the Harland and Wolff shipyard. Not to tender for current shipping orders, no, the Koreans would undercut them. What can Harland and Wolff do that nobody else could? They could rebuild the classic liners of yesteryear for tourists to cross the Atlantic in. Just like last time, the rich will pay a fortune and the unemployed can go one way for ten euros each.

There's space in the yards to employ all those Dell enquiry line operators and a few more besides. They can re-learn the hammering of red-hot rivets and within a year we'd see the old familiar outlines of the Canberra, the Britannic, the Olympic, the Glorious (for specialist cruises), the Titanic... perhaps two Titanics, why not, that would be the most popular ship to travel on. Lightning never strikes twice.

I'll start it rolling by offering here, now, to take a stateroom on the first public sailing of the first Titanic out of Belfast in the twenty first century. Line up, place your pledges, it'll be an economic miracle and we'll cancel the imminent depression in days.


What? You want people from Limerick City (the place we had to put the Irish Army onto the streets a few years back, just to police the more "boisterous" citizens) to move to East Belfast (the place where you had to put your army in tanks for 30 years) and work with each other in the Harland and Wolfe shipyard in some sort of transatlantic ship-building lovefest?

Man, thats the best, no-unforseen-circumstances idea a British person has had for Ireland since Queen Elizabeth I said, "I know Lord Essex (or whatever your name is), these religious wars are so tedious, lets get some of those ultra-hardy presbetyrian Scots planters, uproot them from their homeland, and move them in next to those ultra-hardy Irish Ulster Catholics on a tiny piece of land in the North East of Ireland that we will take from the latter and give to the former, I'm sure it will all work out fine". :wah:



You see, this is why we like being in the EU down here.

But its imaginative, I will give you that.