GPCE

Quaderno wrote: »

Yes, great news indeed. Many people did a lot of work to make it happen.
I noticed how unbelievably tidy the town has become over the last couple of days, even the whole road from the airport to Tralee had been cleaned. Not one single bottle or sheet of paper in the ditches, flags flying on nearly every lamppost and an estimated 25 full size billboards with the "xxx welcomes the GPCE" all the way into town. All the flowerbeds newly planted, the fountains running in glorious sunshine and so on. A really great day for the people of Kerry, and one to be proud of for all who contributed. Thank you!

Ciarrai76 wrote: »

I didn't realise they had already put up a list of the jobs available. I'm tempted to apply, but I've been so long out of the area I am experienced/qualified in that I'm actually too scared to do it! putting up the salary scale might help though as it would determine if I would be better off where I am or not!

PLANS to build a multi billion campus in Tralee for the mooted Euro Pharmaceutical Centre of Excellence have been abandoned by the backers of the project.

The Kerryman has learned that the GPCE company has effectively given up on plans to construct a massive campus-style complex for the highly ambitious project on 32 acres of land adjacent to Shannon Development's Kerry Technology Park near Tralee Institute of Technology.

GPCE, which has leased a small amount of office space in the Centrepoint building in Tralee, has indicated that rather than trying to build and fill a single site, the company will now try to accommodate any companies that are willing to work under the GPCE umbrella in existing offices and buildings in the greater Tralee area.

The Kerryman understands that the buildings under consideration include Centrepoint, the former Aetna premises in Castleisland and a number of potential sites, some of which are still to be developed in the Manor and Mile Height areas of Tralee.

The proposed campus was supposed to accommodate some 45 to 50 small and medium pharmaceutical companies which, between them, would have, according to the GPCE, employed around 4,500 people.

A public meeting last March heard that the planned campus,

on a 32-acre site owned by Shannon Development, was to have been a four-storey building, with a basement level, built on a landscaped site.

The building would have measured a massive 1.2 million square feet in size with a site footprint about 10 acres larger than Croke Park and would have required eight separate car parks.

News that the campus plan has been scrapped follows confirmation last month that the backers of the GPCE project, citing difficulties in their dealings with the IDA and Shannon Development, are in negotiations to move the entire project north of the border to Derry.

That development provoked a furious reaction in Tralee and led to major political pressure on the two state agencies to fully engage with GPCE and secure the jobs for Kerry.

To this end representatives of the IDA and Enterprise Ireland travelled to Washington DC late last month to meet with a number of potential GPCE investors at the 2011 BIO International Conference.

During the trip the group met with US multinationals GRS and Optivia — two of the firms who last March committed to creating 282 jobs based at the Centrepoint building in Tralee. These jobs were to represent Phase 1 of the GPCE project.

So far these jobs have yet to materialise and while the recruitment process has commenced it remains to be seen if Phase 1 will be up and running by the end of July 2011 as is stated on the GPCE website.

ejmaztec wrote: »

They'll be lucky to get two jobs out of this, and it's been a complete shambles.

dapto1 wrote: »

They might need to hire a few people to take down all the signs?

theaceofspies wrote: »

Pleny of lessons to be learned from this fiasco. Unfortunately when will us Kerry folk grow up and get real? - Tom Doodle strikes again. The only winners were the sign makers.