241 Pizza

In Waterford, an area already reeling from the 490 redundancies planned at Waterford Crystal, Honeywell, a manufacturing plant for car parts, said it was laying off 100 staff by the end of this year.

Coupled with the builders’ “holidays”, which the construction industry expects to result in up to 20,000 additional redundancies by the end of the year, it seems as if Ireland Inc has been holed below the waterline.

Irish Small and Medium Enterprises (Isme) described the record jump in the numbers signing on as “frightening” and accused the government of “hiding its head in the sand”. According to the government’s own calculations, every 1,000 people signing on cost the exchequer ¤11m. The government’s budget is based on a projected average of 210,000 people on the live register by the end of this year, but July’s figure of 238,240 would seem to blow this notion out of the water.

Live register figures do not directly measure unemployment as they include part-time employees who can work three days a week. “What worries us is that we have noticed a lot of companies putting employees on three-day weeks rather than let them go,” said Jim Curran, head of research at Isme. “We’d hope these people could go back full-time but the way the economy is going it’s more likely they’ll be made unemployed in the next six to 12 months.”

Isme’s other main concern with last week’s figures is that they show 15,400 extra women signing on since January.

“This shows the slowdown hasn’t just hit construction but has gone right across the economy, hitting catering, tourism and retail where women are in the majority,” said Curran. “If this slowdown continues, we’ll hit 7% unemployed by the end of the year,” he warned.

Fine Gael has greeted the latest figures by highlighting the fact that Ireland’s unemployment rate has jumped above that of America and of fellow EU states such as Austria (4.1%) and Britain (5.25%). The EU average was 6.8% for June.

“There are global causes but it’s pretty clear the situation in Ireland is spiralling out of control,” said Leo Varadkar, Fine Gael’s enterprise spokesman.

“We are closing in on Italy (6.5%) now. It’s a sad day when an open market economy like Ireland has unemployment figures similar to unreformed socialist economies like France, Italy and Greece. This has nothing to do with \ Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.”

Varadkar blames the government for overseeing a slide in Ireland’s competitiveness rating to a level where companies are choosing to invest in Israel or Scotland rather than Ireland’s high-cost economy.

Costs affecting both businesses and homeowners include a record 17.5% increase in ESB prices, which came into effect on Friday, and a 20% increase in gas prices planned for September.

While the government blames the global credit crunch and record oil prices for Ireland’s current problems, some ministers now admit their eyes were taken off the ball by last year’s general election, the change of taoiseach earlier this year and the Lisbon referendum in June.

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