Ireland’s Employment initiative scheme
Aims to deliver 100,000 jobs by the year 2016
100,000 Jobs
THE GOVERNMENT yesterday pledged to help create 100,000 jobs by 2016 with a announcement of a series of job-boosting initiatives.
The 2012 “Action Plan for Jobs” contains 270 measures that are to be implemented across all Government departments and State agencies this year.
A similar action plan will be launched in 2013.
Among the measures are a €50 million State development capital scheme aimed at businesses which want to scale up which will leverage €100 million in private investment; up to €1.2 million per year in extra funding for mentoring and management networks, and the establishment of an export division within Enterprise Ireland.
Many of the most specific measures had been announced or mooted before.
These include the introduction of a partial loan guarantee scheme for small businesses, the implementation of legislation to reform wage-setting mechanisms, the introduction of a “finder’s fee” for people who encourage companies to come to Ireland, and the replacement of city and county enterprise boards with a network of local enterprise offices.
Other pro-business measures in the plan are a requirement that Government departments and agencies identify by next month which charges on businesses can be frozen or reduced for two years.
The public procurement process – the system by which the State tenders its contracts – is to be amended to make it more accessible to small and medium enterprises.
The initiative also includes measures to attract foreign entrepreneurs and start-up businesses into Ireland by appointing “start-up” ambassadors and promoting the State’s €10 million fund for international start-ups.
Pointing out that part of Silicon Valley’s success was its ability to attract non-indigenous enterprises to the area, Minister for Enterprise Richard Bruton said Ireland needed to cultivate a “start-up environment” and attract “mid-size companies who might want a gateway into Europe”.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore said Irish embassies and the IDA would play a key role in targeting potential investors.
The plan also highlights particular sectors that are perceived as offering the most potential for growth in Ireland.
These include cloud computing, digital media, information and communications technology, life sciences, agriculture and manufacturing.
A number of specific actions related to each industry are outlined in the document.
Announcing the jobs plan yesterday, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said the Government wanted to target a mixture of old and new industries.
“I call these companies the old reliables and the new reliables. The old reliables [are] agri-food, tourism and manufacturing. The new reliables are emerging areas like cloud computing, ICT and life sciences.”
He said a significant aim of the initiative was to improve the competitiveness of Irish businesses and “radically improve the way the Government and business interact by cutting both costs and red tape”.
The plan estimates that 20,000 of the 100,000 jobs created by 2016 will be in the field of manufacturing, 30,000 will be in internationally traded services, with the remaining 50,000 jobs indirect spin-off positions.
Stressing the importance of action and implementation, the Taoiseach said he would “personally oversee” the implementation of the plan.
Each agency and department will be assessed on a quarterly basis by a monitoring committee which will come under the remit of the Department of the Taoiseach.
A daft query? Who said that
Kenny defends the Irish Government’s jobs plan in the Dáil
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has described as “daft” demands by Sinn Féin to know how many people will be taken off the dole next year by the Government’s big jobs plan.
Mr Kenny has said asking for specific job creation figures for the Government’s employment action plan is like counting seagulls.
Defending the 270 initiatives announced to drive investment and enterprise, Mr Kenny said it was daft to try to predict the numbers expected to come off the dole each year.
“That’s like saying how many seagulls flew over the Phoenix Park in the last three weeks,” the Taoiseach said.
“This is a daft question. What you need to do is create an atmosphere and opportunity where business can flourish.”
The Action Plan for Jobs aims to get 100,000 people back in work by 2016 and another 100,000 by 2020.
Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams attacked the Government’s plan, claiming many of the ideas have been announced before and warned there is no new money for stimulus.
Mr Adams compared it to the £500m-plus roads and hospitals building programme announced by the Stormont Executive in Belfast.
“Seriously Taoiseach, this is the type of investment and incentive needed,” Mr Adams said.
“I wish you well on all your proposals but this is the only way.”
Mr Adams said it was a contradiction to say jobs could be created through austerity.
“It is good that you will take personal responsibility for delivering on this plan and I look forward to your quarterly reports,” he said.
“However, Taoiseach, this is the third or fourth time you’ve announced some of these proposals.
“Taoiseach, the major problem with your plan is that there is no new money and no meaningful targets.
“The reason that no new money is available is because you remain committed to your austerity programme.”
The world’s ‘fattest man’ is tended to by seven carers a day in London
Keith Mann, a 58-stone man who is believed to be the world’s fattest person, has revealed he is tended to by seven carers a day, costing an estimated £50,000 a year to the taxpayer.
Mr Martin is trying to lose weight to qualify for a gastric band?
Mr Martin, 42, has been unable to work for more than a decade owing to his weight and cannot move from his reinforced bed.
As well as his carers, who wash and change him in two shifts,
He also receives visits from two nurses every other day who tend to his bed sores.
Yet despite the huge drain on public funds, Mr Martin, who is trying to lose weight to qualify for a gastric band, claimed people should not judge him.
He told the Daily Mail: “It’s either that or I would end up dead. Until people have lived like it, they can’t judge.
“Some people need help. Smokers get help, rock climbers get help if they get injured. Some people have bigger problems than others.
“I am trying to get my weight down. Hopefully it won’t be too long.”
Mr Martin, of Hendon, north London, said he was able to enjoy a normal life until his mother, Alma, died when he was 16.
His parents had separated when he was small and his father, Henry, a hospital porter, passed away within a couple of years of his mother.
Mr Martin left school with just a few qualifications and worked as a warehouseman and labourer until his weight, and the resultant lack of mobility and breathlessness, made it impossible.
Taunts of “Dumbo” about his size from passersby in his younger days failed to curb his appetite. By 2001 his weight resulted in him being taken to hospital for the first time.
Speaking in his ground floor bedroom in his council house, he said: “Since then the only times I’ve left home have been in the back of a van to move to this house when we were rehoused or in an ambulance to go to hospital.
“I blame myself, I don’t blame anyone else. It was my fault, I am the one who ate the food. No one held a gun to my head and made me. I hate what I have done to myself.
“I let myself go. It wasn’t comfort eating, I just didn’t care. I got so bloated on sausages, bacon and roast dinners. I just ate whatever I felt like.”
Mr Martin, who has outgrown his size 8XL clothes, is 5ft 9in tall but has a 6ft waist. He has also been diagnosed with depression and had heart problems.
When he has to go to hospital, a specialist team which uses a £90,000 adapted ambulance for obese people is needed to move him. Up to eight ambulance officers manoeuvre him from his bed to the ambulance by stretcher or a special bag which can be used to drag him along the floor.
They last went to his aid in the autumn after he fell at home. Since then, Mr Martin has remained in bed and, in between visits from his carers, spends his days watching his 42in plasma television, playing on his games console or reading.
Yesterday Mr Martin added: “I’ve been told to lose weight or I won’t see 50. I’ve cut down a massive amount on what I used to eat. I’m trying to keep my calorie intake to 2,500 a day [the recommended average for men] – it was at 9,000 calories a day.”
Mr Martin is believed to have taken the fattest man title from a 90-stone Mexican called Manuel Uribe, who has gone on a diet and is now 31st 6lb.
The Irish just put their ‘heads down and get on with it’ so says Joseph Delaney, a 31-year-old Dublin software engineer
There was less industrial labour disruption in Ireland in 2011 than in any other year on record, data showed on Monday, as the government managed to implement harsh austerity without sparking the wide-spread resistance that has taken hold in Greece.
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Dublin has impressed investors by implementing tax hikes and spending cuts under an EU-IMF bailout without significant social upheaval. An agreement not to cut public sector pay or jobs in return for a series of reforms, including a freeze on replacing staff who leave, has helped maintain industrial peace.
“I think people who have jobs are just happy to have them,” said Joseph Delaney, a 31-year-old software engineer working in Dublin. “It’s an Irish thing too, for better or worse, we tend to just put our heads down and get on with it.”
Just 3,695 work days were lost to disputes in Ireland last year, data from the Central Statistics office showed on Monday, out of a work-force of around 1.8 million.
That was half the 2010 level and a tiny fraction of the 329,593 days lost in 2009, when public-sector workers went on strike over the last round of pay cuts. The highest number of days lost was over 400,000 in 1985, the year the Central Statistics Office began publishing the data.
Public sector unions, the strongest in the country, signed up to the “Croke Park” agreement in March 2010 under which the government pledged not to cut pay and avoid layoffs as long as unions agreed to voluntary redundancies and working longer hours.
Strikes in the private sector, which is less unionized, have been on a much smaller scale, such as the strike by 300 workers at lender EBS over a cut to year-end bonuses.
Economists have cited the lack of social instability in Ireland as a factor in a sharp fall in country’s implied cost of borrowing for 10 years on sovereign bond markets to seven per cent from around 14 per cent in July.
Italy, Spain and Portugal have all experienced public sector strikes over cost-cutting in recent months, though on a smaller scale than Greece, where austerity measures that trigger national strikes and frequent riots have yet to rein in the country’s debt burden, now viewed as unsustainable without major con-cessions by private investors.
In Ireland, “people just don’t feel that striking right now is justified,” said Alan McQuaid, Chief Economist at Bloxham Stockbrokers in Dublin.
“There is an impression that Ire-land is taking it on the chin and that is seen as a positive by financial markets.”
The Croke Park deal will probably continue to avert public sector pro-tests this year, said Marie Sherlock, an economist with Ireland’s largest trade union, SIPTU. But she predicted the high number of private sector firms planning redundancies would lead to an increase in disputes.
“I don’t think the numbers will be quite as low next year,” she said. “Things are very rough out there.”
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