The odds remain poor for hundreds of unemployed workers in Donegal, writes Chris Dooley.
Donegal is attempting to recover from the devastating decline of its once-thriving textiles industry.
The hundreds of workers about to lose their jobs, however, will struggle to find alternative employment, judging by the experience of those already made redundant.
Ms Margaret Bell believes her story is typical. After 24 years as a sewing machinist at the Fruit of the Loom plant in Buncrana, she was one of 135 mainly female employees who lost their jobs in January 2001.
Like many of her colleagues, she had joined the company straight from school at the age of 15, so she lacked the skills or education required to secure her another job.
It is not for want of trying that, nearly four years later, she finds herself still out of work. She has been through several training courses, financed either by herself or agencies such as FÁS and the Inishowen Partnership company, and was until recently employed on a FÁS scheme.
But she estimates that some 60 per cent of her former colleagues are, like herself, without regular employment. The odds remain stacked against them. When a coffee shop opened recently in Buncrana, there were 84 applications for the six available jobs.
Ms Bell's anecdotal evidence is borne out by the official statistics. There are nearly 9,500 people on the Live Register in Donegal according to the latest figures, published last Friday.
This is almost as many as the entire midlands region, comprising Laois, Offaly, Longford and Westmeath. Only Dublin and Cork have more people "signing on" than Donegal.
The latest blow was Fruit of the Loom's announcement last month that it is to wind down its remaining Irish operations with the loss of 630 jobs over the next few years.
That followed the decision by the US textiles company Unifi to close its Letterkenny plant this month. That will put 300 people out of work, following earlier large scale redundancies at the same factory.
The county's jobs crisis is not new, however. A task force set up by the Tánaiste, Ms Harney, which reported in 1999, proposed a range of measures designed to create 9,950 jobs by 2006.
Five years later, local interests say nowhere near that number has been delivered, because the required resources were never provided.
Ms Bridie Burns, a member of the task force and one-time SIPTU shop steward at Fruit of the Loom's Buncrana plant, says former employees have "lost heart big time".
"It's soul-destroying when you see the number of jobs being created down south. Of course there are job losses in Dublin too, but then something comes in to replace them. You don't see that here."
Ms Burns, who worked for Fruit of the Loom for 12 years before being made redundant, has just begun a new career as a special needs assistant at a local school.
She is one of many former Fruit of the Loom employees from the Inishowen peninsula who are slowly recovering from the large-scale job losses in the area.
Ms Shauna McClenaghan, manager of the Inishowen Partnership company, says people who lose long-standing jobs go through "something like a grieving process".
However, 57 women have participated in the EVEN (Every Women Valued Equally in the Northwest) programme run by the partnership company for females affected by closures in the textiles industry.
They have been assisted in starting businesses ranging from go-karting to interior design.
Men are also being assisted through other programmes, and a high proportion have become self-employed contractors in the construction industry.
Many can be seen leaving Inishowen with their vans on a Sunday evening to work in the south, returning on Fridays for the weekend, says Ms McClenaghan.
Job-creation agencies including the IDA and Enterprise Ireland have had some success in replacing jobs lost at companies such as Fruit of the Loom and Unifi.
Ms Méabh Conaghan, a Letterkenny-based regional development executive with Enterprise Ireland, says progress has been slow, partly due to the lack of infrastructure such as broadband connections.
An improvement is expected shortly, with Letterkenny one of the first towns due to be connected under a broadband roll-out programme.
Ms Conaghan says hundreds of jobs cannot be replaced overnight, but there is funding available for entrepreneurs with good ideas to create sustainable employment. Enterprise Ireland approved grants of €2 million for indigenous companies in Donegal last year.
Foreign direct investment, however, has been harder to come by. After securing eight projects or expansions for the county between 1999 and 2001, the IDA made just one announcement for Donegal in 2002 and there has been none since.