46 jobs to go as printing plant to close

FORTY SIX jobs are to be lost at the Kilkenny People’s Purcellsinch printing plant on the outskirts of Kilkenny City following the announcement that the plant is to close.

 

 

Staff, 42 full time and four part time, were told that printing of a number of newspapers, including the Kilkenny People, will continue in Limerick following the closure of the local plant.

 

However union bosses at the plant are unhappy with the redundancy terms offered by the British Media Group and there will be a 30-day consultation period with management of Johnston Press who now own the Kilkenny People and many other titles across Ireland.

Workers were told that the Kilkenny People offices in High Street will remain open. This building is occupied mainly by the paper’s newsroom and advertising departments.

A spokesman for the employees told Kilkenny Alive that 46 workers, many of them with young families and big mortgages, will be out of work by the end of October.

Other titles to be moved from Kilkenny include The Clonmel Nationalist, The Tipperary Star, The Leitrim Observer, The Longford Leader and the Offaly and Leinster Express.

This will mean that the Kilkenny People which is over 120 years old, will now be printed outside of Kilkenny for the first time.

The paper has been printed at Purcellsinch since 1988. Before that it was printed at a plant at the High Street end of James’s Street in the shadow of St Mary’s Cathedral.

Five years ago a new printing press was installed at the plant by the then owners Scottish Radio Holdings at a cost of €2.2million.

Johnston Press purchased the Kilkenny People newspaper group and a number of other titles three years ago. In common with newspapers around the Globe, sales of Johnston Press owned titles have been falling dramatically in recent times.

For years, the 'People newspaper, then highly regarded as one of the best provincial newspapers in the country, was owned by the Keane family who lived at Bishop’s Hill in Kilkenny City.

 

Editor/proprietor was John Kerry Keane who along with his wife Leonara and family were respected as first class local employers.

There have already been a number of redundancies at the Kilkenny People.