Had to go to Wales to make telephone call

March 1978

An overnight stay in Fishguard last week has helped to keep one hundred and seventy-seven employees of a Wexford Engineering firm in work.

For without the raw material ordered by telephone from the Welsh port, the firm of P. Pierce & Co., which was recently taken over by the T.M.G. Organisation, could have been in dire straits.

With cross-channel communication next to impossible because of the bad weather and the telecommunications dispute , and stocks or badly needed steel at Pierce’s being at a dangerously low level, the company’s Technical Director, Mr Seamus Corcoran, caught the Rosslare to Fishguard ferry last Friday.

He made a phone call from there to order a delivery of steel for Pierce’s, then overnighted in a harbour hotel and returned back to Wexford the following day with the good news that the much needed goods were on the way.

The firm’s accountant, Mr. Tom Moore, said this week that the exercise had been well worthwhile, for the cost of the trip and the calls could not be compared with the overall effect the rundown of stocks would have had on the firm.