High-street giant Marks & Spencer delivered a hammer blow to the Northern Ireland textile industry yesterday, forcing a leading supplier to close down and make its last 300 workers redundant.
Desmond & Sons, a clothing sole supplier to Marks & Spencer based at Drumahoe, Co Derry, said it was going into voluntary liquidation after losing its contract with the retailer.
The news overshadowed the announcement by BT of 200 new jobs as part of the upgrading and expansion of a call centre, and news of 60 new jobs with the expansion of a small business enterprise park in Co Antrim.
M&S announced it had decided to stop working with Desmond and was going to source its clothing from lower-cost suppliers abroad.
The M&S decision - announced on the day billionaire retailer Mr Philip Green fired the first shots in a takeover bid - was the result of the company's attempts to cut costs.
The 120-year-old family run Desmond textile company was once the biggest private manufacturing employer in Northern Ireland with 3,500 workers at 10 textile factories.
It has been supplying M&S exclusively since the 1960s but, in the past five years, had been forced to gradually move all the work abroad to meet demands for lower prices. It has a series of joint-venture plants in Turkey, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which will now supply M&S direct.
The jobs going - after 500 last year when the last three textile factories were shut in Northern Ireland - involve some 200 workers in the Desmond central warehouse, 60 at its headquarters and the rest in London.
Management at Desmond called the workforce together yesterday morning to tell them of the closure decision.
Politicians on all sides lamented the job losses, which SDLP leader Mr Mark Durkan called "another dreadful announcement" for Northern Ireland. Coming only days after Courtaulds and Invista announced 250 redundancies in the area, he called for government action.
"Our textile industry here is crumbling without adequate assistance from Government."
On the jobs plus side in Northern Ireland, BT said it expanding one of its call centres in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, creating 194 jobs in a next-generation e-customer services centre.
The Enniskillen centre is one of 33 run by BT designated as "Next-Generation Contact Centres" but which will now also become one of a small number of sites handling BT's e-customer service business.
Meanwhile 60 jobs were created with the opening today of a £1.14 million (€1.7 million) extension of a small business enterprise park at Mallusk, Co Antrim, which now houses 44 businesses and 200 employees.
