THERE WERE 2,870 redundancies in December under the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation’s redundancy scheme, taking the total for the year to 58,731.
The number of redundancies last year was down 24 per cent on 2009, the figures show.
In the month of December, the highest number of redundancies were recorded in the department’s “other services” category – which includes professional services, tourism and some retail businesses – where there were 1,236 redundancies.
Avine McNally, director of the Small Firms Association, said the loss of jobs in the services sector was “being compounded significantly by the downturn in consumer spending”.
The second worst hit sector was building and civil engineering, where there were 587 redundancies last month, while the metal manufacturing and engineering and “other manufacturing” categories yielded 591 redundancies. The banking, finance and insurance industry contributed 187 of the redundancies, while there were 143 job losses in the transport and communications sectors.
Over 2010 as a whole, there were 22,589 redundancies in the “other services” sector, 12,457 in the building and civil engineering industry and 12,180 in the manufacturing sector.
The banking, finance and insurance sector was the next hardest hit, with 3,943 redundancies over the course of the year, while there were 3,311 job losses in the transport and communications and 2,922 in distributive trades. The statistics relate to job losses where the employees were eligible to claim for statutory redundancy payments. This means they must have been employed for two years before they lost their jobs.
