Conor Lenihan (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

Of course there are huge pressures on businesses. We would hope to reduce the delays over a period. For the moment we have reassigned 26 additional full-time people into the redundancy payments area to process these payments more quickly. The level of redundancy claims does not bear much relationship to the level of unemployment. That is an important point. In 2002 there were 24,000; in 2003 there were 25,000. Skipping ahead to 2008 and 2009 the figures were 40,000 and 67,000. While it is reflective of the performance of the economy, it does not correlate exactly with the levels of unemployment.

The simplest way to explain the difference to the Deputy between the live register and unemployment is to state that the live register captures unemployment and underemployment at the same time.

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