Longford man calls time on four decade long career at State's largest telecoms provider

Built in 1981, the foundation stone declares it was laid by Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Albert Reynolds TD.

After 44 years of service at the Longford town business, a period that saw the company and the services it offers transform, Olly Kenny is retiring.

Olly joined the P&T (Posts and Telegraphs) on September 17, 1979 training as an installer at 21 years of age: “It was seen as a very good job at the time. There weren't a whole lot of jobs to be had in the country. It was a civil service job, a job for life, and it turned out to be just that,” he recalls.

The prevailing opinion in late 70's Ireland was “if you got a job for life, you were made”. Telecommunications was still an emerging industry. The P&T were a significant local employer. At the peak there were 85 people employed in the Longford depot.

“It was a loose job description, because there were a whole lot of different sections in the job. There were heavy construction gangs, light construction gangs, installers, linemen. They all came under one umbrella,” Olly said of the early days.

The end of the 70s required employees to be flexible: “I started out as a training installer. Then I worked in construction gangs, polling and cabling. I did line repair, telephone installations and telephone repairs. In 1994 I got my first management role. I managed a team that oversaw the construction and change-over when the bypass in Longford was being built. That was my first big project.”

The ramping up of the telecommunications industry was in no small part down to a commitment made by Minister for Post and Telegraphs at the time, Albert Reynolds: “The Irish system was based on a British model. Heavy construction, putting up poles and open wire. I brought copper wires to people's houses. Polythene insulated cables followed that. It went from a year and a half waiting list to get a telephone, to Albert's promise to have it done in weeks.”

Those early days saw work on the infrastructure, like telephone cables, bring P&T workers to every town and village in the region. It also saw the transition from manual switchboard, to new state-of-the-art exchanges: “Granard was operated on a switchboard. That's where a caller got an operator and asked to speak to say Granard 23. You had big industries like Pat the Baker, working on these manual switching systems.”

Albert Reynolds as Minister for Post and Telegraphs went straight from a manual operated switching system to a digital system.

The impact of such a change was immense: “It was amazing. It was utterly transformed. The technology sprung from an analogue system to a digital system in a very short space of time. It had an enormous social impact.”

One of the reasons this change was so profound was because of the prevailing economic climate in the 1980s: “It was built in the depth of a depression. When things picked up in the 90s it was a vital component of the national infrastructure.”
The changes in the 1990s would see telecommunications move from a State monopoly to a private company. From the P&T to Telecom Éireann in 1984 then to Eircom in 1999 the company was transformed.

“In the 1990s it was an absolutely wonderful place to work. We had a really genuine customer service ethic. The company was driven by customer service. It was a great place to work and we took immense pride in what we did.”

Olly says Telecom Éireann was very important to Longford: “It built more houses. It saw people married, families reared, kids put through universities than ever before in this country. It paid for holidays. There was a wonderful staff.

“The strength of the company was the staff. Great people on the ground, especially the field staff,” Olly recalled.

The social changes Ireland was going through at this time was a mirror of the technological changes the industry was experiencing. The rate of technological change since Olly first started in P&T has been astonishing.

“When I joined I was putting up 'open wire' to serve people's telephone service, which progressed to bringing digital fibre optics into people's homes, with a gigabit of data speed. Data speed in the early eighties was 64 kilobits. It's a massive leap.

Yet that fibre optic infrastructure could be obsolete in 10 years.

“I've personally implemented transformations. We've had five or six really big transformations of the way we operate our business. Back in 2000 I was printing off orders every day for lads to do work, handing them out every morning. Now they have it on their phones,” the retiring manager says.

Olly will leave the Eir HQ in Longford which now has a staff of seven. Nationally the staff has also shrunk dramatically. A peak workforce of 19,500 is now down to just 3,000 souls.

“It's technology. My brief was preventative maintenance work on the network and its upkeep. Making sure it's up to the standard required. I've had teams of between 18 to 25 staff for the last 15 years. Now it's 11, and very soon there'll be only nine.

“We cover all of Longford and Westmeath, Cavan, Leitrim, parts of Sligo, Roscommon, part of Mayo, a good chunk of East Galway, North Offaly,” he tells.

There are many good memories of his time with the company: “The people I worked with down the years were incredible. We had amazing people here in Longford. They created, and they contributed greatly, to the fabric of Longford and the Midlands. It was a pleasure working with them all. The customers were also great. The feedback we got from customers was always very positive.

“You were either going to repair their line or else you were doing an installation. An installation they were waiting on for ages. Bringing a telephone into a person's house in the early eighties was like bringing them a pot of gold. People love to see you coming.”

That welcome spawned thousands of stories: “The welcome and hospitality you got from customers was amazing. I remember one old guy who lived on his own. He lived up near Lough Gowna, up a road, off a side road, down the bottom of a field. It was a freezing cold day. We were frozen and this man brought us into his home. He gave us a lunch of slices of ham, boiled eggs, cheese and bread. It was manna from heaven.

“He was such a lovely man. He had such amazing stories about how he was farmed out as a boy to a big farmer. Moments like that will live long in the memory.”

As Olly brought the gates of Eir together for the final time last Friday he had one final message: “I have to say thank you to the people of Longford who welcomed so many of our workers into their homes. Also the people who worked for Eir down through the years, people who gave great service. It was a pleasure and a privilege to work with those people.”