The main Opposition parties say the Government is failing to take the necessary fiscal steps to halt the dramatic rise in unemployment.
Responding to the latest quarterly national household survey which indicated unemployment was now running at a nine-year high of 5.1 per cent, Labour and Fine Gael said the Government was failing to recognise the scale of the problem.
Fine Gael’s finance spokesman Richard Bruton said the figures the extremely rapid deterioration in the economy that has occurred since March
Mr Bruton said: “There is now an alarming gulf between what the Government is doing and what is necessary to change the underlying economic performance.
“The Government’s spending packages are no more than papering over cracks in a mindless exercise and are not based on delivering genuine value for money and cutting out serious waste,” he added.
Labour’s enterprise, trade and employment spokesman Willie Penrose claimed the Government had no strategy to either protect existing jobs that might be at risk or to attract new investment.
Mr Penrose said: “Tens of thousands of building workers and their families are paying a high price for this Government’s gross mishandling of the construction sector."
Sinn Féin’s economic spokesman Arthur Morgan criticised the Government for what he claimed was its failure to prepare for the slowdown in the economy even though all indicators pointed to such an inevitability.
He said: “The Government ignored all the warning signs that the economy was heading for a slowdown and failed to prepare for the recession even though all the economic indicators pointed to such an inevitability.
The Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed co-ordinator John Stewart said the figures clearly demonstrate the pressures that the construction and manufacturing sectors are experiencing.
He called on all relevant State agencies to maximise their efforts to continue to attract inward investment to replace the jobs that are being lost and to ensure that the necessary job seeking and other supports are available both to existing unemployed people and those who are losing their jobs.
Employers’ group Ibec said the figures show that the labour market continues to weaken.
The group’s chief economist David Croughan said: “The deterioration in the labour market is now spreading beyond house-building.