Time to bail out the Unemployed

31 Mar 2010

Today the Central Statistics Office released the Live Register figures for March 2010. The Seasonally Adjusted figure is up 600 to 433,000 while the unadjusted figure is down 1,835 on the February figure to 435,121. The standardised unemployment rate in March was 13.4%.

"The INOU strongly believes that urgent action is required to tackle the on-going unemployment crisis. The Government's priority has clearly been to bail out the banks and we are now calling on the Government to, in effect, bail out the unemployed by urgently bringing forward measures to maintain and create employment" said John Stewart, INOU Co-ordinator. Today's figures, coupled with last week's Quarterly National Household Survey results underline the scale of the unemployment problem facing the country.

Long-term unemployment has increased significantly and urgent measures are needed both to prevent people from becoming long-term unemployed and to support long-term unemployed people to move from welfare to work. Up-skilling people for the jobs of tomorrow is vital," said John "otherwise there is a real danger that long-term unemployment will continue to grow and become intractable". However, the organisation is concerned that addressing this issue without proper investment in Ireland's future will not result in job creation that is accessible to many unemployed people and other job seekers.

A Jobs Strategy is urgently required that spells out how the job growth predicted for the Irish economy (by the IDA, FAS and the ESRI) will be linked into the education and training courses on offer to unemployed people.