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• Business podcast: May 12th

  May 12, 2011 @ 7:30 am | by John Collins

  Dominic Coyle and Barry O’Halloran discuss the Government’s jobs initiative, Cian Blackwell from Grant Thornton on corporate governance and Maeve Kneafsey on the IIA annual conference.

   

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• Business podcast: May 5th

  May 5, 2011 @ 7:32 am | by John Collins

  Brendan Butler discusses Ibec’s job creation proposals, Declan Stone of Colliers International on the retail property market and Ciaran Hancock on Liberty Mutual’s plans for Quinn Insurance. John Collins presents.

   

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• Is Brian Cowen’s pessimist another man’s realist?

  November 27, 2009 @ 8:22 pm | by Laura Slattery

  “Optimism” and “potential” are  words “we need to hear more of”, Brian Cowen told the Irish Exporters Association (IEA) last night, and he didn’t mean in a sentence such as “optimism and potential are no longer words that apply to the Irish economy, thanks to a series of serious policy errors by a person not standing a million miles away from you right now”.

  What he actually said was: “We should not let others talk us down, nor should we do it ourselves. We should not forget that our Irishness gives us a distinct selling point in the world today.”

  Unfortunately for the Taoiseach, it hasn’t been a cheery week for news, economic and otherwise. On the jobs front, the redundancies piled up as the week progressed. Aviva began the week by saying it was to wind down its Dublin fund management unit, with the loss of 30 jobs. On Wednesday, car dealer EP Mooney went into provisional liquidation with the potential loss of 95 jobs. That same day, the iconic travel operator Budget Travel also hit the wall. Countless babies have been born as a result of Budget Travel’s cheap packages in the sun. Now 172 livelihoods will be lost.

  Yesterday, some 310 jobs in Cork and Sligo evaporated. Option Wireless declared that it was making 150 people redundant in Cork, less than a year after Mary Coughlan said the wireless technology company would create 145 jobs , while Tiscali chipped into the north-west’s misery by announcing that it was to close a contact centre in Sligo, with the loss of 160 jobs.

  Is it any wonder that fears of redundancy are at a 10-year-high, according to an Ipsos MORI poll?

  In the interest of balance, there was at least one job creation announcement this week: Penneys is to create 60 new jobs in Waterford. Otherwise, it was slim pickings, unless you count plans for a job-spinning all-weather ski and casino tourism complex in Co Louth. The prospect of slaloming in the Dundalk area sounds like fun, sure, but it’s all rather speculative at this stage of the game.

  To be fair, it’s not just Ireland that’s stuck in this labour market malaise. In the UK, Borders fell into administration, putting 1,150 jobs in doubt. Lloyds Banking Group joined in by signalling the loss of a further 800 jobs; while airline BMI said it planned to axe 600 jobs. Meanwhile, General Motors said it would shed 9,000 jobs across Europe, most of them in Germany, and the economic ramifications of the emerging Dubai debt crisis are yet to be properly calculated.

  But whatever the problems that exist elsewhere, claiming “Irishness” as the USP that will get us out of trouble is political waffle of the most galling kind – exactly the type of thing that makes it so hard to be upbeat.