THE GOVERNMENT was urged to implement an action plan to ease the jobs crisis yesterday as new figures showed that the rate of unemployment increased last month to 11 per cent.
As further cracks appeared in the fragile economy, some 20,000 people joined the seasonally adjusted Live Register of unemployment benefit claimants in March, taking the total number of claimants to 372,800.
Employers’ group Ibec called on the Government to provide temporary support to viable companies to help them survive the recession and retain their staff, while small business group Isme reiterated its call for the introduction of an emergency employment action plan, which it said was necessary to “stave off a complete breakdown in the labour market”.
However, Labour Party employment spokesman Willie Penrose said the Government had “thrown in the towel on unemployment and abandoned the unemployed to the miseries of the dole queue”.
The number of people on the Live Register has increased by 87 per cent over the past year as the fallout from the bursting construction bubble, the global financial crisis and an unfavourable sterling-euro exchange rate have all hit the Irish labour market hard.
Separate figures from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment released yesterday show that the number of people eligible for statutory redundancy payments in March was 7,802 – up 238 per cent on the corresponding month last year.
Fine Gael employment spokesman Leo Varadkar called on the Taoiseach to adopt Fine Gael’s proposals to support business and retraining.
“More than one in 10 people are now on the dole,” Mr Varadkar said. “This is a catastrophe on a massive scale.”
Meanwhile, the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU) said the Government must treat the unemployment crisis with the same degree of urgency as the financial crisis.
“Hitting unemployment payments is not the way to go and we are again calling on the Taoiseach and the relevant Ministers not to reduce unemployment payments or their duration in next week’s budget,” said INOU head of policy Bríd O’Brien.
The INOU has called for guaranteed employment-related education or training places for every unemployed person aged 21 or under, while the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) said State supports for the “job ready” were currently inadequate.
Not everyone on the Live Register is unemployed. The Central Statistics Office (CSO) estimates that almost 60,000 people out of 372,800 total number of claimants are casual and part-time workers who are entitled to the jobseekers’ benefit or allowance payments.
After increases of 33,000 and 26,700 in January and February, the rate at which the Live Register is swelling slowed down in March.
However, some economists expect further heavy job losses in the months to come, with the number of claimants likely to exceed 500,000 and the rate of unemployment expected to cross the 15 per cent line by the end of the year.
