Vol. 573 No. 2
56 Ms Shortall asked the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment if her attention has been drawn to the recent warnings from FÁS and the ESRI of further significant job losses; the steps planned to counter this pattern; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [24476/03]
Despite the slowdown in the world economy, the Irish labour mar ket has been resilient with employment continuing to grow and unemployment remaining stable. The most recent data on employment levels available from the quarterly national household survey, QNHS, for the second quarter of 2003 indicate that there are 1,778,300 persons in employment. That represents a growth of 28,000 or 1.6% in the year.
At the end of June there were 81,400 persons unemployed, a decrease of 3,500 in the quarter and an increase of 4,200 in the year. The unemployment rate equates to 4.4%, which is well below the EU average of approximately 7%. The level of increase over the year is small and is lower than might be expected in the prevailing international economic climate. While job losses have been experienced in some sectors, these are being more than offset by employment opportunities in other sectors and the ESRI predicts that this will continue to be the pattern into the foreseeable future. The ESRI forecasts that the average numbers in employment will grow by 1.1% in 2003.
The challenge for the future is to ensure that Ireland remains competitive internationally. In a labour market context, one of the means for achieving this is through retraining of both the employed and the unemployed. To this end, employers will be encouraged to invest in training and to develop programmes to facilitate employees adapt their skills through further training, re-skilling and lifelong-learning. In addition, research and innovation, both in terms of product and process development, is critical and a key focus is to increase the rate of commercialisation of research.
