Waterford is to receive a significant jobs boost today with the announcement that NTL, the company which bought Cablelink last year, is to set up a customer-management centre in the city.
More than 250 customer-service, tele-sales and technical support staff will be employed at the centre, which is to be operational by the middle of next month. Recruitment begins immediately.
The announcement will relieve some of the gloom which followed last week's decision by the Italian company Luxottica to lay off two-thirds of the staff at its Waterford plant, where it manufactures Ray-Ban sunglasses.
The mayor of Waterford, Mr Pat Hayes, said the jobs were badly needed because of the city's continuing high rate of unemployment. "We're absolutely delighted that NTL has decided to come to Waterford, but our delight is tempered by a huge sense of disappointment arising from the situation at Luxottica."
He said 75 staff had already been let go from the Ray-Ban plant before the announcement last week that a further 165 were to be made redundant. "They were very high-quality jobs and we hope the jobs coming in are of the same quality," he said.
Mr Hayes said recent live register figures showed Waterford city had an unemployment rate of 14 per cent. "We need additional jobs in Waterford and we feel we have been badly let down in the past."
The news will be welcomed as evidence that the south-east is at last beginning to benefit from the boom in call-centre jobs. The region is heavily dependent on more traditional manufacturing industries.
Mr Ian Jeffers, NTL Ireland's managing director, said the centre was being opened to enable the company to respond "quickly and efficiently" to customers' needs.
NTL bought Cablelink last May from RTE and Telecom Eireann for £535 million and said it would be investing at least another £200 million upgrading the cable company's network.
