JOB CREATION:THE STATE'S energy authority has rejected a Green Party claim to have created 20,000 "green" jobs while in Government.
The Greens yesterday announced plans to create 100,000 jobs between now and 2020 as part of a “green” recovery and claimed to have created or delivered 20,000 such jobs in the face of the recession.
The party claimed its figures for job creation had been independently verified by the Sustainable Energy Authority.
However, last night the authority said while it had audited green job employment, the figure of 20,000 referred to job announcements rather than jobs actually created. Many of the projects will take some years to become a reality and no audit of the number of jobs actually created has been done.
The Greens said yesterday they have a proven track record in the creation of employment, and said their future plans include investments in forestry, home insulation, eco-tourism, electricity interconnection and broadband.
The party says it would invest €500 million from the National Pension Reserve Fund to insulate homes. It wants 150sq km of new forest planted and high-voltage electricity links to Europe to export enough energy to power up to two million homes.
The Greens also propose transferring all public services to cloud computing and providing access for the private sector to government data.
The party would abolish Forfás and redirect savings into the Enterprise Ireland and IDA grants, and it proposes the creation of a “green IFSC” for carbon verification and green financial services.
Former Green minister Eamon Ryan said the greatest potential for large volumes of jobs was in the digital economy and Ireland was especially well placed to take advantage of developments in this sector.
Mr Ryan said only 10 per cent of Irish small businesses were online, but he would like to see them all active on the internet so they could export. This could be accelerated by training young unemployed people as web experts and making them available to companies.
Mr Gormley said the Greens would be proposing a radical reform of severance payments for departing ministers in a policy document to be published later in the campaign.