Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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Question 14: To ask the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment the breakdown of types of employment that account for the job losses since the start of 2008; the way he accounts for the equal number of male and females made unemployed in the past weeks; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [16761/08]

Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)
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The numbers of actual redundancies notified to my Department for 1 January — 31 March 2008 broken down by sector and gender are as follows:

These figures show the number of employees on whose behalf claims were submitted for statutory redundancy lump sum payments. They do not reflect those who lost their jobs with less than two years service in an employment.

These figures show that slightly more than twice as many males were made redundant in the first quarter of this year as females, with the largest number of male redundancies occurring in the building and engineering sector, where 1,892 males were made redundant versus a figure of 130 for females. I have no control over the number of redundancies that occur at any given time. However, it must be remembered that redundancy — as recorded in these statistics — does not equate with unemployment.

Employment/unemployment is measured by the Quarterly National Household Survey, collated and published by the Central Statistics Office. The most recent Quarterly National Household Survey, Quarter 4, 2007 (Sept-Nov) indicates that employment has increased by 66,800 or 3.2% in the year. The unemployment rate is currently at 4.5%. Data for Quarter 1 2008 (December-February) will not be available until May/June 2008.

Employment has increased in the year in most sectors, apart from other production industries and construction, when comparing data year on year (Q4, 2006 to Q4, 2007).

The Department of Social and Family Affairs maintains the live register. The total number of people recorded on the live register for March 2008 is 197,992. The live register is not designed to measure unemployment. It includes part-time, seasonal and casual workers entitled to unemployment benefit.

The live register has increased over the past number of months with the increase, pro rata, being higher among males. However, the live register results for March reflected an almost even split between the increase for both males and females. The fact that Easter fell in March is a contributing factor to the increase. The live register normally rises due to temporary lay-offs during the 2 week period of school holidays. The numbers employed in the educational sector is split unevenly between males and females with 35,500 males and 103,600 females.