Jobless in Clare at all-time high

THE number of people signing on the Live Register in Clare reached 10,883 in January, up by 264 on the previous month.

This is the highest figure since the onset of recession, although it is only marginally higher than the 10,865 recorded in February of last year.
In January, there were 6,019 signing on in Ennis, 1,771 in Ennistymon, 1,505 in Kilrush and 1,588 in Tulla.
Slightly less than two-thirds of those signing on in Clare are male.
While there was relatively little change in Tulla and Kilrush compared to December, there was an increase of 203 in Ennis and of 63 in Ennistymon.
Labour General Election candidate Michael McNamara said the creation of jobs is the biggest issue facing the country. “I was down in the University of Limerick with Jan O’Sullivan doing a survey last Monday and every single student we surveyed expected that they will have to emigrate to work. That is a profound failure of a State. Our State, as we know it, has failed and it now has to be reformed, fundamentally reformed. Government structures have to be reformed, economic priorities have to be reformed, the priority has to be giving everybody in Ireland the dignity of work.”
He said the Labour Party has a credible strategy, which can make inroads into the jobless figures. “We saw similar rates of unemployment when Labour last entered government in 1992 and by the time we left in 1997, we were creating 1,000 jobs a week and they were real jobs, they weren’t boom jobs of the Celtic Tiger years. There is a way out of it, with stimulus for growth. You won’t achieve growth without stimulus. That is why the Labour Party uniquely among the major political parties is proposing a stimulus fund of €500 million specifically targeted at creating jobs and getting the country back to work.”
Fine Gael’s Joe Carey said his party is the only one that has policies that can make a significant impact on the dole queues. “Fine Gael are the only party that have a strategy that is coherent. We have a policy document called New Era and under it, we will invest in infrastructure, in broadband and in water services. We will get construction workers, who are now out of work to use their skills to improve our infrastructure to allow us to compete with other regions,” he said.
Mr Carey said Fine Gael intends to tackle youth unemployment and that the parties’ policies would take 45,000 young people off the Live Register.
On a local level, Mr Carey said Shannon must be developed as a Lynx cargo hub while he said that Clare’s forest must also be tapped into, as a natural resource from which employment can be generated.
Fianna Fáil’s Timmy Dooley said the dole figures reflected difficulties businesses are having in getting credit.
“Most of the jobs are being lost in small and medium enterprises and the major reason for that is lack of credit. The Government has been working to try and deal with this and to try and get the banks lending again,” Mr Dooley said.
He said he didn’t share the view that reducing the budget deficit could be done over a longer period of time. “The flipside of that is that you continue borrowing at high levels of interest. You’re only putting off the day of reckoning,” he said.