Economy
The demise of the once thriving canal and maltings businesses brought about a serious decline in Banagher's fortunes, including a significant population decrease. However, a number of businesses kept many people in the locality employed during lean times. The most notable of these was Bord na Móna, a semi-state company founded in 1946 to manage the harvesting of peat from Ireland's bogs, the most extensive of which are located in the midlands. However, the advancement of mechanised harvesting, the exhaustion of the bogs and the closure of a number of peat-fired power stations, means that this is no longer a significant employer in the region. Green Isle Foods had a facility just outside Banagher and provided good employment during the 1970s and 1980s. It was taken out of production some years ago and is now used as a storage facility only. The largest industry in Banagher these days is Banagher Precast Concrete Limited, a company specialising in precast concrete structures. The company employs approximately 50 people and was one of the largest concrete firms in the country, employing over 400 people at its peak in 2008. It has supplied components for many major projects, including the Aviva Stadium, Croke Park, Channel Tunnel, the Dublin Port Tunnel, Thomond Park and the Limerick Tunnel. Other notable employers include Banagher Sawmills and the cruise liner businesses located at the marina.
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Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Quidquid luce fuit tenebris agit: but also the other way around. What we experience in dreams, so long as we experience it frequently, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we “really” experience: because of it we are richer or poorer, are sensitive to one need more or less, and are eventually guided a little by our dream-habits in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful moments occupying our waking spirit.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)