Galway Chamber of Commerce is a privately constituted organisation with about 600 companies, from small companies of sole traders right up to the multinationals employing about 20,000 between them. Certainly the labour supply market is drying up. There are serious problems with many sectors. One statistic concerns Galway where, in 1993, about 5,000 people were employed directly in the city in industry. That figure has nearly doubled to almost 10,000 people, 75% of whom work in the multinational sector, so there has been a huge growth in employment on offer. That has led to pressures in the more traditional sectors. Career opportunities are available in the hospitality, service, retail and indigenous industries. There is certainly an issue there but it is an issue for all sectors. At the same time, the live register adjusted figures show 171,000 plus on the live register.
To examine the issue the committee is concerned with, and I compliment the committee on the excellent work it is doing on behalf of taxpayers, looking at Galway as a microcosm, and I am also a director of the Galway City Partnership, in October 1996, just over 4,000 people were long-term unemployed in Galway city. Three years later, in October 1999, that figure was down to about 2,000 people, so it has been roughly halved in those three years. Interestingly, in the first 18 months of that three years, the figure dropped by 1,700 but only by 300 in the second 18 months. There is now a levelling off of those figures. We are finding a hard core of people in that category of long-term unemployed whereas three or four years ago the problem of unemployment was so enormous that we just tried to implement measures that reduced the figures. Two thousand people is a very manageable figure and it is now time to look at the individual stories behind those figures in a humane way and from the point of view of potential fraud, if that be the case. We heard earlier that there were 74,000 long-term unemployed people on the live register as against 38,000 on the survey so there are matters to be investigated there.
I have looked at the live register in Galway and the figure as on 21 January 2000 is 5,262. Over 800 of those people fall into the category of part-time workers while 361 are signing for credits, although people signing for credits may not regard themselves as unemployed and may give different answers to somebody doing a doorstep survey.
In relation to labour supply and some of the issues we would like to see addressed, one recommendation would be a constant review of the live register as it reduces to determine exactly how it is constituted and if it is possible that long-term unemployed people will ever be employed, and the measures we should introduce to ensure that happens.
The issue of rent allowance and child care should be seriously examined. People losing rent allowance, even though it is not administered by the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs, is a serious issue particularly when one considers the escalation in house prices and house rents in Galway. Rent allowance forms a huge part of people's income.
