THE BUYERS of a troubled manufacturing company say there is no reason why the original complement of 420 workers should not be restored eventually.

Yesterday Collinstown, Westmeath-based Iralco announced that 90 per cent of workers at its car parts manufacturing plant had voted in favour of a survival plan presented to staff last Sunday.

Galway group CF Tools will take over the business, which will be renamed CF Automotive over the coming weeks. Neither side disclosed the sale price yesterday, but reports have suggested that any survival plan will require a €10 million investment.

Joe Hanley, adviser to the company, said he believed Iralco was the first company in Ireland where workers had taken the opportunity to vote themselves out of liquidation.

It is envisaged that in the short term only 20 workers will be made redundant, with up to 60 further, mostly voluntary, redundancies planned on a phased basis to increase efficiencies at the company, which produces anodised external trimmings for Volkswagen, Audi and Ford.

Its new management confirmed to The Irish Times yesterday that these customers are “on side” and set to continue their relationship with the Collinstown-based business.

Despite having a large number of orders on its books, Iralco went into liquidation last April and liquidators McStay Luby undertook to find a buyer for the business, which is acknowledged as a powerful brand-name within the industry.

The cost of the buyout by John Flaherty of CF Tooling and Tom Hyland has not been disclosed, but Mr Hyland says “a significant investment is being made to turn the company around”. Mr Hyland, manager until recently at Iralco’s Ukranian plant, says it is his intention to build the company again, but that there is a “major mountain to climb in terms of the company’s financial health”.

Mr Hyland added that without the business, the west midlands region would become an unemployment blackspot.

He said the workforce had clear ideas about how to achieve growth and these emerged during the intense one-to-one communications that took place between both parties in the lead-up to the ballot.

Mr Hanley agreed that they had been pleased with the significant, frank and valuable input from the staff with regard to efficiencies.

“A constant and consistent quality of product” is a core requirement of the blue-chip multinationals that Iralco supplies, he said, emphasising that in general they had been very supportive and hopeful that Iralco would stay in business.

He said that workers had voted for the plan not out of fear that the company, which is worth €8 million annually to the local economy, would go under, but out of a sense of reality that any of the proposals put forward by John Flaherty and Tom Hyland had “a clear logic geared towards making the company efficient again”.

It was confirmed that there will be no pay cuts, but that overtime will be reduced and the working week lengthened.

National officer for Unite, John Bolger, said it was worth observing in the context of pay talks that in this case the union had stood back and let the situation develop as it should. He said they had met the principals, but the final decision had been left up to the workers.

The union had not offered a recommendation, but he said that the result was “a great thing for all who are claiming a stake for their families, the company and the local economy”.

“It does buck the trend that Iralco has changed course when closure was mooted and now has a future.” The official transfer of the company will take place in mid-September.

Back on the road to recovery: page 2