Reversal of fortune in cyber town

It's a sign of how fast Leixlip has developed in the last few years that the people who live or work there are stymied when asked to hazard a guess at the size of the population. "Five thousand?" offers Aaron Tracey, a negotiator at Leahy Property Consultants; "over 20,000?" hazards Fiona Fennelly of Intel; "25,000," suggests Irene Fitzpatrick of Hewlett-Packard.

The last available census figures for Leixlip date from 1996, and record a population of 13,451. Kildare County Council's planning department estimates that the current population is about 15,000, but it's interesting that Leixlip's residents and workers have such an apparently vague and fluctuating perspective on the numbers of their fellow townspeople, such has been the speed of its development.

In 1999, a new housing development in the town was marketed under the cheerfully insouciant monicker of "Cyber Plains" - the houses simply had an extra phoneline so that people could hook up to the Internet.

Buyers queued overnight to place deposits on the 300 Cyber Plains houses, which sold out within days. Prices ranged from £125,000 up to £220,000: only the year before, three-bedroom houses in the area were reported as selling for between £85,000 and £95,000. Last year, a three-bed secondhand house in Cyber Plains - longsince renamed as "Rinawad" - took four weeks to sell. This year, it is "around 16 weeks", according to Aaron Tracey. "A lot of that would be confidence in the market. Everyone wants to rent at the moment, not buy, but there is a big shortage of rental properties," she says.

A three-bedroom house in Cyber Plains cost £700 a month to rent last year, and this year is fetching £900: an increase which probably accurately reflects trends elsewhere, post-Bacon, in which investors have effectively left the market.

John O'Byrne is a partner in Dobbins, the long-established Dublin restaurant. Why did he choose Leixlip as a location for a second restaurant? "I realised a lot of people were trying to buy houses around here, and I knew there was a market for a really good restaurant in the area," he says. Beckett's opened in 1998, and the 12-bedroom hotel and 100-seater restaurant, which has its own wine cellar, has the reputation of being the best in Leixlip. Starters average at £8.50, and main courses go up to £19.50: a sample menu offers pan-roasted ostrich, aged fillet of beef and darne of salmon. They're prices which would make you blink.

That Beckett's has survived for four years, and is currently turning over a healthy £30,000 a week, says a lot for the size of its customers' wallets and local expense accounts. Intel and Hewlett-Packard are known to regularly entertain clients there.

"A restaurant is the best barometer of how well the economy of the locality is doing," states O'Byrne, who is confident that next year's turnover will be even bigger.

At Intel, the mood is resolutely upbeat. Employees Lisa Harlow, Fiona Fennelly, Keith Brennan and Kerrie Horan are all under 31 - both Intel and Hewlett-Packard have predominantly young workforces. Harlow, a public affairs officer, has been with Intel for 12 years. Horan, who is just out of college, has been here five months.

Intel, the world's largest maker of micro chips, currently employs 3,150 people in Leixlip. Last month, its third-quarter profits fell 77 per cent, and some 250 people lost their jobs. This is aside from the 1,000 construction workers temporarily laid off in March from working on "Fab24", a 135,000-square-foot extension. From a workforce in the thousands, the loss of 250 jobs may not seem proportionately worrying right now - although it is the first time in recent years its numbers went down instead of up. However, these particular Intel employees do not seem concerned for their own futures, even though the spouses of both Harlow and Fennelly also work for Intel: in-house romances are apparently common within the large company.

"I do get questions from relatives about do I have all my eggs in one basket, since both of us are working here," says Harlow, "but because I'm here so long, I have no fears or worries."

Interestingly, none of them, apart from Karina Howley, the company's press officer who insisted on sitting in on the interview, and whose job it is to know these things, can put a correct estimate on the company's workforce numbers. A fall in the number of people on the payroll might mean less to you if you didn't know how many were on it in the first place.

"We're one of the biggest companies," comments Brennan, a manufacturing engineer, who has been with the firm for eight years. "I don't think anyone in here has a fear of losing their jobs. We've seen two recessions here before anyway, and got through them."

He is 30, and started at Intel in 1993, when the economy was scrambling out of the tough 1980s. How would he define recession, that loaded word which possibly people over 30 would not use so lightly?

"Oh, I mean a downturn," he explains cheerfully. "A temporary downturn!" Language takes on different shades of meaning with each new decade, it would appear.

More than half the workforce of both Intel and Hewlett-Packard do not live in Leixlip: they commute from towns such as Mullingar, Athlone, Drogheda and Dundalk. This means that should there be further significant loss of jobs in either company in the future, the impact will be geographically spread, yet it will be Leixlip's name that will face any job-loss stigma.

At present, there are 2,000 employees at Hewlett-Packard, with an average age of 27. A recruitment freeze has been in place for several months and the 200 people who left in the last year "through attrition", as the company's press officer, Una Halligan, says, have not been replaced.

Husband and wife Maire (European operations specialist) and Aidan Kindlon (systems engineering manager) have both worked there for six years, and bought a house at Cyber Plains two years ago. "I'd be confident that we'd come through any difficulties," says Aidan Kindlon.

"We've been talking about changes for a while, and the company is trying to address it. We could see a downturn coming well before September 11th."

"I wish the Government would stop saying we're heading for a recession," Marie says. "People are still spending."

"What's happening now is a natural progression, and we're coming back to a bit of reality," says Irene Fitzpatrick, who has worked with the company for 18 months.

"We could see the forecasts a year ago," Halligan says. "You don't keep hiring people when the economy starts slowing down, and we didn't. We can't control things like interest rates or the wider economy, but what we can control we will, like expenses and recruitment. We react instantly; we don't wait until it is too late."

If Leixlip, with its much-reported recruitment and property boom of the late 1990s, can be considered to be a useful benchmark for the state of the wider Irish economy, this statement could well be one on which other towns and companies around the country are now reflecting.