JOHN Gilligan is a man in demand. Before this interview, he has had the correspondent from Corriere Della Sera, Reuters are trying to reschedule and a woman from Le Monde is due tomorrow.

Usually, Limerick only gets this kind of attention after a big rugby match or, more often, a terrible crime. For six months now, Limerick's first citizen has been happy to disavow reporters of the notion the city is the only place you will find violent crime in Ireland. But this time, the press want to talk about something else: the loss of 2,000 jobs at Dell and Limerick as the synthesis of Irish economic failure.

"Limerick has very good stories to tell but all they want to know about is the doom and gloom," rues the mayor, just as his phone goes off.

The ringtone is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I had to Google this under "creepy classical music".

Connoisseurs will know this music as one of the high points of baroque but most people associate it with vampires getting out of coffins.

"Before talking about Dell, I want to recognise the unbelievable work being done by Limerick City Council particularly over the last four years. Four years ago, management and Council members sat down to take a long hard look at the city. One of the major problems we always had was not getting a boundary extension which led to a huge rates imbalance between the city and outside which will still have to be addressed at some stage. We decided we couldn't sit around playing the blame game but would have to do something positive ourselves, nobody else was going to do it. In the past four years Limerick has done something no other city in the country has even come close to doing. Whereas the average increase in rates across all the cities has been 12 to 14 per cent, we reduced ours by two per cent.

"That has never happened before. We had an outstanding debt of €20 million which was there. We have wiped that clean. We have reduced our staff by at least 10 per cent and yet all this has been achieved in four years," the Mayor says.

"While we have been doing that, we have been busy improving the place. Take a look at what we have done at Clancy and O'Callaghan Strand, the pedestrianisation of city centre, and recognising the People's Park as the only park in Republic to have an international green flag. All these things have been achieved and it can be difficult to get this news out."

It is bothering him, however, that rather than reward Limerick City Council, the Government has cut back on its funding to run what has become a bigger city since the northside boundary adjustment. And attacks on public sector workers from IBEC and others are also starting to rankle with Limerick's left-wing mayor.

"What really bothers me, particularly over the last couple of months, is that a) the problem has been caused by the public sector and b) the solution is to attack the public sector. This is the public sector at its very best at Limerick City Council, people who have outperformed. I have worked with them since 1991. We have people who would outshine anybody in the public sector."

Asked if he expected staff cutbacks to be forced upon the Council, he says: "I would certainly hope not. These things would be resisted. Isn't it rather interesting we are being lectured by a Government about what we should do. We have been doing it for four years. We should be lecturing the Government. We knew what we were doing. We had a look and said we are in the good times, we have to outperform everybody else because the lean times will come. The Government has now decided, 'Well ye should have been doing this'. We have been doing this and the recognition we get is to have cutbacks across the board."

MAYOR Gilligan might be heaping them with praise these days, but Limerick City Council once tried to have him jailed over his part in the water rates protests of the 70s and 80s. Born in Keeper View, he has lived in St Mary's parish all his life and is genuinely seen as a man of the people. A typical gesture was his recent break with tradition in refusing to have the plates on the mayor's car customised to read 09-L- 01, as the cost would have been too much. He has been elected at each time of asking as an Independent candidate. He was briefly a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party and later campaigned for prisoners in the H-blocks. But he came to prominence while in the vanguard of the water protesters and it was here where he ran into a spot of bother with his current employers.

"Limerick City Council took me to the District Court, the Circuit Court and the High Court. When they turned off the water, I turned it back on again. Jack Higgins, the then manager who went on to be a very good friend of mine later, pulled a great stroke and said that because I was unemployed at the time I didn't have to pay water tax and I got a waiver without even applying for one," he recalls.

He had worked in refrigeration before he found himself without a job in the middle of a recession. He has been through lean times before.

"After we joined the EU, we had to reinvent the entire industrial base of Limerick city. We lost three major bacon factories, two clothing factories, the shoe factory, Irish Wire, Ranks, all these major employers, and we lost most of the jobs in the docks. The core of the business activity in Limerick simply disappeared and we had to reinvent ourselves, which we managed to do in time."

There have been major job losses announced before. Ferenka, the Mayor says, was "always doomed to failure" as the Japanese had invented nylon tyre treads, making the steel wire product obsolete, by the time the Limerick plant was up and running.

The Krups closure is a closer comparison, as both Dell and the appliance maker had highly-skilled workers manufacturing quality products for the global market. The Government has made much of the fact that those two graveyards – Ferenka and Dell – are once again thriving centres of industry but Cllr Gilligan says that is of little consolation to the 2,000 Dell workers and thousands more working with Dell suppliers.

"We are going to find these jobs very hard to replace. One thing that struck me when I met Mary Coughlan was she shook my hand and said to me, 'Here's Mr Positive'. I said, 'Tanaiste if you can find anything positive about 10,000 people losing their jobs in this region inside the next 12 months, then tell me what it is.

The task force hasn't been set up yet and I don't know what it is expected to achieve. But it was also practically impossible for the Government to deal with Dell when the company was refusing to tell them even what was happening and I have to be honest about that.

How you replace 10,000 jobs I do not know. All our major customers – the UK, Germany and France – are all in recession, experiencing similar problems." While he condemns Dell for keeping the Government in the dark, the mayor says it was even worse for them not to keep the workforce informed. "The fate of the Dell plant in Limerick was sealed three years ago when they first made the approach to Lodz in Poland and then proceeded to build a plant twice the size of what they had in Limerick. When that was first mooted, they chanted the same mantra all the time: 'We do not respond to media speculation'. When a very prestigious paper like the New York Times said they had good authority they are moving to Poland, it was: 'We do not respond to media speculation'.

"Then the final insult to people's intelligence was that on the Wednesday afternoon. People were called and told there was a meeting on Thursday morning. Management stood up and told them Dell was closing and moving to Poland, something we had been saying for three years, and made the incredible assertion that the decision had only been made that week. I do not believe that. That's what made me so angry with Dell. Had they been honest three years ago, the people in Dell would have been able to retrain for different jobs. Now you have a problem that people are being giving the bad news at the start of the biggest recession we've ever seen. People have taken out mortgages because Dell have said anything about closing down is only media speculation.

"A company has corporate responsibility, particularly in the case of Dell where they refused to allow people join a trade union and would have sacked them had they done so. They also made them sign a contract saying they couldn't even speak about Dell on the outside, they were gagged. Now they are being told they are all being made redundant. They have no union to speak for them so how can they negotiate better wages and agreements?

"Back in the times of James Connolly and Jim Larkin, to think that not only would you not be allowed to join a union but that you couldn't even talk about the job. It is immoral how the workers in Limerick have been treated, especially when you consider what Dell got in return. They had the highest productivity of any factory within the Dell organisation, huge output, huge quality, they worked all kinds of unsocial hours to the extent that family life often came second. They worked for less than the average industrial wage, which was often unsaid, and they never had major industrial relations problems in Dell. Those are four major factors that counted for nothing."

THE mayor says he recognises the profit margin is the main motivating factor for multinationals but notes the world is changing. On the day of the interview, Fianna Fail was nationalising a bank and a black man was being sworn in as president of the United States. Cllr Gilligan admits he would never have thought either event possible when he first ran for the City Council in 1991.

"To nationalise anything was a Communist sin and you were never allowed to say things like that. After all this was the private sector and bankers were the nicest bunch of people you could ever meet. I never did think I would see the day that this would happen. The problem is we make nothing out of it because the banks have gone broke. We now have to bail them out but you can bet your life on this: that as soon as the banks are back making money, the little gombeen politician will pop up in Dail Eireann, looking at his friends across the room, saying we have no business running a bank, let's give it back to the private sector." "As for Barack Obama, I always believed that despite what those who control society would like, the human spirit is indomitable and I was absolutely delighted to see there is a black man in the White House. He has been invited to Limerick by myself and the chairman of the County Council and obviously myself and John Gallahue would have a lot in common with him."