Westmeath’s live register set to hit 11,000 shortly

The number of people on the live register in Westmeath has crept up to just under 11,000 in the last month, according to the latest figures released by the Central Statistics Office.At the end of July, there were 10,936 on the live register locally - 336 more than at the end of June, when the figure stood at 10,570.Mullingar saw an additional 181 people join the register, and a further 66 names were added in Castlepollard, while the Athlone figure increased by 119. There are now 5,313 on the live register in Mullingar; 4,279 in Athlone, and 1,344 in Castlepollard.Labour TD Willie Penrose has accused Government of letting the jobs crisis slip to the bottom of its agenda.With 14,000 extra gone onto the Live Register over the month since the end of June, and an increase of over 34,000 in just a year, there are now 466,824 out of work.“The only factor that has prevented these figures getting much closer to the half million mark, is the fact that tens of thousands of people are leaving the country every year,” Deputy Penrose told the Westmeath Examiner this week. He said that virtually all of the decrease in tax revenues - down by €1.5bn in just a year - was down to the fact that more and more people are out of work, or have had their hours cut.“When it comes to tackling this problem, this Fianna Fail/Greens Government is like a deer caught in the headlights. They have a strategy to rescue the banks; they have a strategy to introduce savage cutbacks in crucial public services, they even have a strategy to lease vacant houses from bankrupt developers, but they have no strategy to tackle unemployment,” he stated.Government cuts do nothing to create jobs. In fact the more money they take out of the economy the more likely it is that the numbers of people at work will continue to decline.Cllr. Peter Burke, of Fianna Fáil, pointing out that the ESRI has warned of large-scale emigration and zero job market growth, has said that the Government must make job creation and protection an absolute priority.“The ESRI’s report contains some stark warnings:• 120,000 people will have left Ireland in the two years to next April;• Unemployment levels may fall in 2011 only because so many people are leaving the country;• There will be no net job creation over the next two years, with employment levels set to remain static,” said Cllr. Burke.“This crisis is crying out for new thinking to create new jobs, to protect current jobs, and to retrain and upskill the legion of unemployed. But there is little prospect of any such initiative under this Government, whose understanding of what it takes to turn the economy around has been completely exposed by its disastrous management of the banking crisis. Massive borrowing associated with the Government’s banking strategy will continue to undermine international confidence in Ireland.”Laid offMeanwhile, figures from the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (ISME) show that almost 500 people were made redundant in Westmeath in the first six months of this year. However, the number - 474 - was down considerably on the level of redundancies recorded in the same period last year, when some 820 people lost their jobs.The figure for the first six months of 2008 came in at 303. According to ISME, nationally, some 35,256 people have been made redundant in the first six months of the year. Of those, 57 per cent were employed in construction or manufacturing, and 43 per cent in the services sector.“Females now account for 37 per cent of redundancies, confirming that job losses continue to be spread throughout the whole country,” ISME chief executive Mark Fielding told the Westmeath Examiner this week. He said that the true level of unemployment is under-reported through increased emigration, increased participation on state training initiatives and a significant rise in individuals remaining in education.“These facts mask the true picture in the jobs market,” he said.