Redundancies top 2,000 a month for 2007
More than 2,000 people were made redundant every month last year, new figures revealed today.
The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment said 25,459 people – 15,632 men and 9,827 women – lost their jobs in 2007.
The highest number were recorded in Dublin city and county where 10,844 positions were axed.
In Cork, 2,707 redundancies were made, with 1,250 in Limerick, 1,172 in Galway and 1,147 in Kildare.
The only county to have less than 100 redundancies was the country’s smallest county Leitrim where 87 posts were lost.
The figures, from the redundancy payments section, include workers forced out of employment and those who opted to take a retirement package.
But despite the massive number of job cuts announced during the year, latest figures from the Central Statistics Office revealed just over two million people were working in the State.
Eircom, Waterford Crystal and Coca Cola were among the State’s biggest firms to confirm job losses.
The telephone company said it would cut 900 positions over the next three years - with 400 to go by the end of 2007 – while the drinks giant axed 250 positions in Drogheda, and almost 500 are due to go at Waterford Crystal’s plant in Kilbarry.
The south west of the country suffered one of the biggest blows with thousands of jobs lost between Thomson Scientific and Healthcare, Limerick, FCI in Fermoy, Motorola in Mahon, and Pfizer. A further 500 jobs went at the Abbott Laboratories plant in Galway.
The Department of Trade said job cuts per sector – calculated at the end of November – showed 3,445 losses across the building and civil engineering trades.
It also showed 1,789 redundancies in distributive trades, 1,274 in transport and communications, 8,675 in other services, 976 in metal manufacturing and engineering, 5,921 across other manufacturing, 836 in banking, finance and insurance, 419 losses in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, 294 in extraction industry (chemical products) and 111 redundancies in the energy and water sector.
