The owner of the Vita Cortex plant in Cork has begun to transfer redundancy payments into the bank accounts of former staff.
The workers have been staging a sit-in at the factory since last December.
The group says it will not leave the factory until everyone has received the payments in their accounts, but confirmed that a small number of staff had already received their money.
The total number of workers sitting-in at the factory in Cork is 23.
It was originally 32, but nine people abandoned the sit-in in January.
Jim Power, who worked in the company for 42 years, said the support they received from people all over the country kept them going, and the workers could never thank the public enough.
Asked was the 159-day sit-in worth it, Mr Power said the workers would never get the time back, but they achieved what they had set out to do.
"Five and a half months - there's nothing or no amount of money will buy that back for us, five and a half months gone out of our lives," Mr Power said.
"It was like being detained...but we done [sic] it, we stuck to our guns and we done it.
"Looking back on it now, we never expected it to last that long, and maybe if we did think it would last that long, we mightn't have done it. But we done it and it's worth it at the end."
