SHANNON AEROSPACE has announced it will shed a sixth of its workforce at the Co Clare airport, with 107 people set to lose their jobs.

The Lufthansa Technik subsidiary, which had employed 628 staff in the airport, said its business of maintaining commercial airplanes had declined significantly in the face of changing international and domestic markets.

RTÉ reports that company MD Thomas Ruckert described the day as the “most difficult day ever experienced by Shannon Aerospace in its 20-year history”.

Ruckert said the company’s cost base was too high to allow it to survive in a competitive market, and addressing such costs by cutting the workforce was important to try and maintain its competitiveness

Elsewhere on the jobs front, Hewlett Packard is to create 120 high-tech jobs at its enterprise facilities in Clonskeagh in Dublin, though 70 of those jobs will be transferred elsewhere if the Irish workforce is not qualified enough to fill them.

The fifty guaranteed jobs – which require multi-lingual capability in modern European languages – are to be created immediately.

Jobs are also being created at Just Mobile, a new virtual mobile phone operator, which launches today with the immediate creation of 25 jobs, rising to 70 in the coming years.

The new network, which piggybacks on the Vodafone carrier, donates 1c per minute from its call charges to a charity of the customer’s choice.

Further, American-based Alliance Healthcare Information – which provides support and marketing services to pharmaceutical companies – is also to create jobs with a new multi-lingual EU call centre to be created in Dublin, though it isn’t known how many jobs the new service will create.