The banshees are wailing, the shillelaghs are flailing and the Little People are beside themselves with anger over Digital Equipment Corp’s decision to end manufacturing at its Galway site, but new president Robert Palmer has demonstrated with this one decision that he had the backbone to see DEC safely out of the woods – not only did he resist the combined blandishments of the entire Boston Irish community, Irish Employment Minister Ruairi Quinn and Tony O’Reilly, Irish-born chairman of H J Heinz Co, but he also rode the unbridled wrath of the most fearsome and dreaded computer journalist in the world, Maureen O’Gara, who was straight onto the phone to his office muttering dire imprecations as soon as she got wind that Galway might go.
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