Anger as number of jobless rises by 9%
More than 173,000 people signed on last month a 9% increase on this time last year and the highest figure since December 1999, according to the Live Register's seasonally adjusted figures.
The Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed (INOU) has accused the Government of focusing too much on attracting foreign investment and not giving enough support to indigenous companies.
INOU general secretary Eric Conroy said: "We are shocked that the numbers out of work have risen by 25% since 2001 and we cannot believe that the Government would actually cut the budgets of job creation agencies like Shannon Development, the IDA and enterprise boards."
What is very worrying is the fact that the April figures show that most of the people who lost their jobs were women, Mr Conroy said. Out of the 3,600 who lost their jobs last month, 3,200 were women who were mostly aged over 25.
While the INOU welcomed the increased investment in job creation in both Arklow and Waterford announced this week, it stressed that this comes alongside the loss of 250 jobs with the closure of Celestica in Swords and the downscaling of Unifi Textured Yarns in Letterkenny.
"These new jobs will provide little comfort to the recently redundant employees because they will not come on stream for another few months and are in different locations and sectors," Mr Conroy said.
The INOU also believes the Government must get inflation under control and improve our competitiveness in retaining foreign companies to halt the rise in unemployment.
Fine Gael claimed the rising Live Register figures are due to indirect taxes and charges on jobs imposed by the Government.
The party's enterprise, trade and employment spokesman, Phil Hogan, claimed the Government was trying to correct the nation's finances by imposing taxes on employment, in the form of major increases in VAT and excise duty, energy and electricity charges and higher insurances costs.
"After six years in office, the Government has failed to produce any plan to deal with the cost-competitive issues in the Irish economy," Deputy Hogan said.
Labour warned we are heading once again for live register figures of 200,000 out or work if the Government does not act swiftly to halt the drift. The party's enterprise, trade and employment spokesman, Brendan Howlin, said what is of most concern is that the Government does not seem to have any strategy for dealing with the job losses.
The Government must get the National Development Plan back on track and borrow for capital projects if it is going to stem the rising unemployment tide, Deputy Howlin added.
But the Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment defended its record by stressing the number of redundancies notified to it last month in the year to date was just over 8,000 a fall of 1.6%.
