Richard Bruton: Measures to foster jobs paying off

In early 2011, 7,000 private sector jobs were being lost every month. Now, 2,000 jobs are created each month, writes Richard Bruton

LISTENING to conversations between executives at Anglo Irish Bank from 2007 and 2008 has been a shocking experience for many Irish people over recent weeks.

For many of us, it served as a reminder of the madness that went on in the years around the crash. It also provided startling new revelations about what senior bank figures were saying to each other at the time, particularly about their interactions with the Government acting on behalf of the taxpayer at the start of the State’s financial collapse.

One thing it inevitably reminded me as jobs minister was that these were the days of the beginning of the employment collapse which has caused such hardship for so many Irish people.

Between the start of 2008, when some of these conversations were happening, and the end of 2010, when the troika arrived, more than 250,000 private sector jobs were lost in Ireland.

This jobs collapse had been many years in the making. Policy and regulatory failures by previous Governments played a major role.

Over a period of years, our international competitiveness plummeted. This made it more difficult for our exporting companies to increase their sales abroad and made Ireland less attractive to multinational companies.

At the same time, sectors like construction, domestic financial services and the public sector grew employment to unsustainable levels.

When I came into this job in early 2011, the private sector had been shedding an average of 7,000 jobs per month for the previous three years. Many of these jobs were in construction and other sectors which had been allowed to become too big over the boom years. However, many of them were also in multinationals and Irish exporting companies which were suffering from the loss in competitiveness which had built up over the previous decade.

The boom economy, based on property, banking and debt, was unsustainable and cannot be rebuilt. We must aim to build a new, sustainable economy based on exports, enterprise and innovation. This is how we will create the new, sustainable jobs that families across the country so badly need.

Since being in Government, we have been busy implementing our plan to drive the transition from the old unsustainable economy which we inherited, to the new sustainable, jobs-rich economy we need. This plan has had many elements:

- The Jobs Initiative, implemented within 100 days of taking office, targeted specifically at the tourism sector. There are more than 9,000 additional people now at work in tourism activities compared to when we took office;

- Stimulus investment announcements which will result in an additional €8bn in capital spending by the State on jobs-intense projects;

- Pathways to Work, driven by Social Protection Minister Joan Burton, aimed at ensuring that where jobs are created they can be filled to the greatest extent possible by people from the Live Register.

At the centre of our efforts is the Action Plan for Jobs. Through this plan, year by year, month by month, we are implementing hundreds of measures right across Government. In this way, we will make the cumulative changes necessary to support the new, sustainable jobs-rich economy we need. So far, we have implemented over 400 actions across all 15 government departments and more than 30 agencies. To give a flavour of what this involves, measures we have delivered include:

- Schemes which will deliver more than €2bn in new credit to businesses;

- A range of new supports for SMEs;

- Measures to support multinational employment;

- JobsPlus, a scheme to pay cash incentives to employers who hire people who are long-term unemployed.

Most importantly, we are starting to see the results. People across the country have made massive sacrifices over recent years, and thanks to their efforts and the hard graft of enterprises and workers across the country, we are starting to see progress in the jobs market. It will take some time for the effects to feed through, and many people across the country are not feeling it yet, but this progress is real.

Since we launched and started implementing the Action Plan for Jobs in early 2012 more than 2,000 additional jobs are being created every month in the private sector. This is not enough, but it marks major progress from 2008-2010 when 7,000 jobs were being lost every month.

The progress is being driven by the sustainable, exporting parts of the economy, where we have seen many major announcements over the past two years such as Kerry Group, Glanbia, PayPal, Ebay, Apple, and Mylan.

The challenge now is to build on this progress and accelerate the job creation we have started to see.

I am convinced that, through the plan we have put in place, with continued determined action by Government, we can make this a reality.