Job subsidy scheme to be extended

THE EMPLOYMENT Subsidy Scheme introduced in August to encourage employers to retain staff is to be extended to non-exporting companies, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Mary Coughlan announced.

The decision to change the eligibility criteria comes as Enterprise Ireland – the agency responsible for administering the scheme on behalf of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment – faced mounting criticism from business groups that the eligibility criteria were too restrictive, the application process too laborious.

Under the original scheme only manufacturing companies that exported a minimum of 30 per cent of their output were eligible to apply. Last month, Isme, the association for small and medium-sized businesses, said that there were just 561 applications for the scheme out of a pool of more than 400,000 businesses in Ireland.

Ms Coughlan said yesterday that she was “surprised” that the uptake had been smaller than anticipated and said that the second call for applications “takes into account some of the issues raised by businesses”. Details of the second phase of applications will be published next week.

Ms Coughlan confirmed that to date 453 employers have been successful in their applications for the scheme, which provides a subsidy of €9,100 per qualifying employee to “vulnerable but viable” firms over a 15-month period.

Representatives from Enterprise Ireland and the department faced criticism from Opposition politicians at an Oireachtas committee meeting yesterday.

Fine Gael’s spokesman for enterprise Leo Varadkar said that there was a significant “dead weight cost” involved in the scheme, as the Government was subsidising jobs that would have been saved anyway.

Enterprise Ireland’s Feargal O’Morain defended the scheme, saying that businesses were required to submit a detailed business plan and cost-flow statement to prove entitlement. He said while the scheme is directly supporting 7,000 jobs, employers were required to commit to sustaining a larger number of jobs in order to qualify.

“In reality, the scheme is supporting 35,000 jobs,” he said.