Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)

On 10 May the Taoiseach introduced his jobs initiative, stressing that it was not a budget. In May there were 440,000 people on the live register. By the end of August that figure had risen to almost 500,000, or 14.4%. It is now clear that this jobs initiative has failed, the policy of squandering the National Pensions Reserve Fund on the banks rather than using it as a stimulus has been seen to fail, and austerity is not working, the most acute evidence of which is the swelled ranks of the dole queues. Today, as we meet in this Chamber, hundreds of people who work for Aviva fear for their jobs. This comes hot on the heels of the loss of 475 jobs at TalkTalk in Waterford, losses of jobs in the Gaeltacht, and 425 job losses in Pocket Kings and Allied Logistics in Dublin. These are but a sample of the haemorrhage of jobs. At what stage did the Government become aware of the threat to the jobs at Aviva and what contact, if any, has there been by the Government with the management at Aviva?

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