Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

In just over ten minutes time, the Central Statistics Office will publish the latest unemployment figures. Last month, these figures showed that more than 240,000 people were on the live register, which constituted an increase of 80,000 over the figure for the same month the previous year. The latest available figures from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment state there were more than 32,000 redundancies notified to that Department in the past year.

Rising unemployment is the single biggest economic problem that Ireland now faces. It is contributing hugely to the problem in the public finances. Every additional person who becomes unemployed is one less worker paying tax to the State and one more household drawing social welfare and related benefits. Moreover, that is before one counts the social and personal cost of unemployment. I wish to ask the Taoiseach two questions. First, will he tell Members the total number on the live register, which will be published and announced by the Central Statistics Office in ten minutes time? Second, when I asked the Taoiseach last September what initiatives the Government had taken to deal with the unemployment problem, he could not point to a single initiative the Government had taken over the entire summer period. I again ask him today whether he can inform Members of specific initiatives the Government has taken or is taking to halt the slide in unemployment and to put people back to work.

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