Bad News

A few months ago we were covering a story on WLR about the takeover of US pharmaceutical firm Genzyme by French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.  Exciting eh? The thing is of course, Genzyme is a major employer in Waterford and one of the few in the last three years that didn't appear to have a question mark hanging over it, but takeovers make people nervous.  And so they should, takeovers are one of the times when the naked ruthlessness of capitalism is exposed, on show for all to see. Sanofi appeared to be smiling at Genzyme through shark's teeth.  Besides, as the good people in Talk Talk management proved this week, profitability and a good workforce is no reason not to close a factory. In order to make sense of the Genzyme takeover – which was safely outside the power of my mind - I got in contact with Meg Tyrell, a Bloomberg correspondent who knew the sector inside out and was very helpful.  She seemed to think everything would be okay in the short and medium term, as for the long term, well, capitalism doesn’t really do the long term.  I told her afterwards how glad I was not to have relay any more bad news to people in Waterford, “I hear you on that” came the response from the American accent on the other end of the line. It’s truly horrible to have to report on job losses, not as bad as having to endure the lost job itself, but it is depressing and working as I do for a business that depends on local spending power, it’s not hard to see personal consequences down the line.  Last week’s news that Talk Talk was closing its Waterford operation with the loss of 575 jobs left me and many like me nauseated with worry as to how this will affect my city and family; meeting the workers affected left me angry and upset with how ordinary, decent working people in Waterford were being treated by the principles of international capitalism.  Of course, as I say that I have to acknowledge that the jobs wouldn’t have existed in the first place without international capitalism – you get no answers off me folks.  None of the emotions I’ve just described have any place in the reporting of this story, one can only hope that feeling upset, angry, scared might bring you closer to the factual truth of how the workers are feeling, but I don’t advise going all Peter Finch.  Over the weekend we also marked the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  That was a bad news day.  The attacks started just before two in the afternoon Irish time.  I was reading the news that day but was still pretty new to the job.  I knew a plane had hit the tower when I went to read the news at two o’clock, but I no had real idea what was going on, or the size of the aircraft.  As I was getting towards the end of the bulletin, I was told a second plane had crashed into the other tower, confirming not only was it not an accident, but a coordinated attack.  While I was reading the news on WLR at three o’clock, still not fully understanding what the hell was going on, I was given a message on air that the first tower had collapsed.  At the time I wasn’t used to broadcasting off the cuff, I clearly remember my throat contracting and mouth drying up but most particularly a dizziness as my brain started to issue emotional responses, as if on reflex, while I was live on air.  With the collapse of the tower I knew that thousands of people had just been murdered and that something terrible was going on.  The most frightening thing was not knowing where this was going to end. What happened was bad enough, but at the time, as the news got worse and worse and events built up with a brutal speed, we wondered what was next. It seemed so many people were involved in the attack and intent on so much destruction that I remember thinking a nuclear explosion had to be next. For a half an hour, as the towers were collapsing, I wondered whether this was the end of the world.  It was hard to deliver news that day. New York being the world’s greatest city, its destruction felt a bit like the end of the world. The fact that so many of those emergency personnel had Irish surnames made the whole thing a lot personal to us.  But that wasn’t my worst bad news day.   That was the day when Waterford’s end of the world came.  When receivers pulled the plug on Waterford Crystal in January 2009, the national press spoke about hundreds of job losses, quite right too.  In Waterford though, the closure, and the brutal way it was handled, and most of all the desperate defiance of the workforce, went beyond figures and lost incomes.  It was a spiritual and existential crisis for every single individual in the city.  Each person had to come to terms with the trauma caused when a Dublin accountant decided one cold winter morning to end my city’s sense of itself.  It wasn’t easy to report that one in a detached manner.  I find maintaining impartiality in politics easy, enjoyable even, but when the sit-in started at Waterford Crystal it was the only time I remember wanting to shout, get angry, man the barricades.  I didn’t, and no doubt I would have had little useful to say, but being a reporter was never harder than that day.  And yet, life goes on.  New York is still New York, and Waterford will still be Waterford.  I think a man (or woman) picking themselves up from the ground with a bloody nose, and dusting themselves off while making a black, black joke has always been our self-image.  We’ll pick ourselves up; I just wish we didn’t have to do it so often.