There have been over 600 redundancies in Westmeath so far this year, new figures released by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment have revealed.
According to the regional breakdown of redundancies for the period January to October 2008, 604 people in the county were made redundant. The Westmeath figure represents 1.86 per cent of the total national redundancies during the period.
Neighbouring counties have also been badly hit by redundancies. In Meath a massive 899 people were made redundant, while the total number of redundancies in Offaly was 437, Laois 444, Roscommon 302, and Longford 236. Meanwhile in Galway, 1,812 people have been made redundant this year, while Dublin redundancies at over 12,000 made up 37 per cent of the country’s redundancies.
According to the Small Firms Association (SFA ), the new figures are a sign that job losses are spiralling out of control, with a total of 32,076 jobs lost to date in 2008, which represents a 50.2 per cent increase on the comparable period in 2007.
“These figures should serve as a wake-up call that good quality jobs are going to the wall in all sectors of the economy and across all regions. Ireland cannot afford to keep losing an average of over 712 jobs a week in 2008,” commented SFA director Patricia Callan.
“Small business owner-managers are now faced daily with the difficult decision of telling someone they have lost their job, in order to cut costs and give the business the best chance possible of surviving the economic downturn, and keeping the remaining jobs secure. It is time the Government and the unions realise that our best chance of surviving this economic downturn is to moderate our expectations, reduce cost pressures on small businesses in all areas, and trade our way out of this downturn,” she added.
Ms Callan also pointed out that the spread of redundancies across the country makes them all the more difficult to replace. “These figures clearly demonstrate that job losses are becoming much more regionally spread. This poses particular challenges as the loss of such a significant number of jobs in regional areas will be more difficult to replace than in the capital”, she commented, calling on the state agencies concerned “to do all in their power to promote the creation of enterprise, and therefore employment, in a regionally-balanced way.”
