Seagate. Sea change. As long as I live I don't think I'll forget the face of the Clonmel factory worker on the nine o'clock news last Wednesday night. The sight of that young man, his jaw jigging up and down like that of a drowning man plucked from icy seas in winter, was heartbreaking as he struggled for words to explain his devastation at hearing that he and 1,400 other colleagues were to lose their jobs. It wasn't himself he was thinking of, he was at pains to point out, it was the others: thousands of them, he said, choking back a threatened avalanche of tears. The married workers, many of them both working in the company, with children, mortgages, car loans, other bank loans, commitments up to the hilt. He'd be fine, he said. He was a single man living at home. He'd been through it before, what with Digital closing in the town before anyone had ever heard of Seagate. But the others, the others, he seemed to be pleading. It was almost too much to bear.
Seagate job losses
After what felt like a never-ending stream of major job-creation announcements - thousands here, there, and everywhere - it was eerie and almost unbelievable to be told of the Seagate losses. It wasn't just 50 jobs, or 500 but over 1,000. This sort of thing just doesn't happen in the days of the Celtic Tiger, or so we thought. Job losses - like murders nowadays - no longer seem to merit a mention on newspaper front pages unless they are particularly grisly or numerous.
We can only wait and see if there will be a rescue package or replacement industry for Clonmel or if, after the production lines are silent and the last shift goes through the gates, some of those who returned to Ireland on the strength of a good job will once again take to the ferries in search of work abroad. We may soon be doing again what we have done best for centuries: exporting our people, our ideas, our skills, our hopes.
But, hey, let's not get too gloomy here. Isn't there the other side, the real Celtic Tiger? So many of the young people who have gone to seek their fame and fortune elsewhere have done just that. They now stare out at us from the cinema screens, the pages of the glossy magazines and our TV sets: actors, film stars, musicians, artists, business people.
Many of the young Turks making a name for themselves, particularly in the media, are graduates of DCU, or the "Northside University" as it is sometimes disparagingly called. When I was a member of staff there in the early 1980s the library was the size of a small, semi-detached house; there were no students' union premises, no sports facilities, no bar; just lecture rooms and a canteen.
The courses provided by DCU (then known as the NIHE) were like nothing else on offer in the traditional universities: nowhere to be seen were medicine, biochemistry, English, medieval history, etc. In their place were exotic-sounding courses such as communication studies, international marketing and languages, chemistry and German.
Television and radio
Several of those once shy, gauche communications students now are television and radio in Ireland, Britain and elsewhere - people such as Father Ted's Ardal O'Hanlon and Pat O'Mahoney, presenter of RTE's Head to Toe. O'Mahoney says the joke at the time he graduated in 1986 was: "What do you say to a communications graduate with a job?" Answer: "A Big Mac and French fries, please." Not any more. Nowadays the answer is more likely to be: "Any jobs going your way? Here's my CV. Can I throw my coat over that puddle for you?" Many of the influential movers and shakers in the media business now are the socalled backroom boys and girls - the directors and producers. One of O'Mahoney's classmates from DCU, Helen O'Rahilly, has just become, at 32, the youngest ever female series producer in the BBC. She's now in charge of the Beeb's consumer affairs programme Watchdog, on which she has worked since 1991. The original Watchdog has now spawned another six programmes in the consumer arena, with average audience figures of eight million. O'Rahilly cut her teeth in RTE and quickly showed the kind of determination which Pat O'Mahoney spotted in her at college and which has (by her own admission) earned her the nickname Stalin in the BBC. Not for her hanging around dossing and relaxing after her final examinations: she hotfooted it off to RTE before graduation and ended up filming her own class's graduation ceremony for television news.
Turned down
After a brief stint researching for Today Tonight, she left for the BBC at Pebble Mill, Birmingham, where she worked briefly with fellow Irishwoman Gloria Hunniford. After three years in London with various independent production companies, including Hat Trick, the makers of Father Ted, she moved to the BBC having been turned down for a trainee director's post by RTE in 1991. The rest, as they say, is history.
Her appointment is quite an achievement in the BBC, an establishment groaning with Sloane Rangers and people with jobs on the who-you-know basis. As she says herself, it's unusual for an Irish woman from Glasnevin with an "unpronounceable" surname (OhRa-Hilly is what the Beeb's pronounciation department came up with) and, needless to say, no Oxbridge degree, to rise among the ranks of the Armani suit brigade. DCU's current prospectus warns that the communication studies degree "does not, in itself, qualify graduates for careers in journalism". Who cares? The sisters and brothers are doing it for themselves.