Mr. David Orford:

I will address Senator Murphy's question around redundancy. I work for a local development company in the north Dublin area. We have been operating a local employment service and a jobs club since 1995. We have approximately 28 staff working between the jobs club and the LES. Many of them have been with the company since the beginning. They are highly-skilled and highly-experienced staff. I recently asked our financial controller to work out the cost of statutory redundancy if we did not procure a contract and if we had to make our staff redundant. The cost was €302,000. We do not have money to pay that. The Department has never allowed us to build up a reserve for redundancy or for any other emergency costs. The attitude of the Department seems to be that it is not the employer, it is not its problem and it is for us to sort out. The cost of redundancy is a very serious concern. If we take account of all the local employment services in the country, it amounts to a substantial sum of money. There has been no guidance from the Department on how this is to be addressed.