People have always been the Emerald Isle’s most successful export, and British Telecom has recruited 36 Irish engineers to help ease the backlog of maintenance and installation work on the City of London’s telephone network: the Telecom Eireann engineers will work on frames, external jointing, cable work and City exchanges under a three month contract between the two phone corporations, and if the experiment proves successful, Telecom has an option on recruiting 100 more engineers; the company says that it has been forced to look abroad because of the shortage of trained technicians and the continuing high City workload – the National Communications Union blamed the shortage on earlier rundowns in the engineering workforce and believe that the Irish represent the thin end of a wedge of short-term employees.
