Minister for Trade, Enterprise and Employment Micheál Martin has urged people not to take the recent spate of job losses out of context, promising that new opportunities were in the pipeline for the high-tech sector.
Electronics firm Motorola confirmed yesterday that it is to shut its Cork-based plant as part of a global cost-cutting plan, with the loss of 330 jobs, while only days ago US automotive electronics firm Bourne Electronics announced 80 redundancies.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Irelandtoday, Mr Martin said a similar situation was seen in the first two months of last year, when about 4,000 jobs were cut from the Irish economy. "The good thing is we created more jobs than we lost," he said.
He emphasised that the job cuts were the result of worldwide difficulties for the firm, and not something that was related specifically to Cork. "It's a global economy and global companies will have their own difficulties and their own challenges," he said.
"Motorola clearly had and they didn't reach their own financial targets or objectives by the end of 2006 and decided to globally cut their workforce. Unfortunately Cork suffered as a result of that."
Mr Martin said attention should be given to the small- and medium-sized enterprises who may not be grabbing headlines, but account for some 800,000 jobs in the economy. He said Enterprise Ireland had spent five days with Motorola, recognising opportunities for new small enterprises to emerge from the situation, due to the knowledge and expertise of workers built up by the Motorola workers in the high-tech sector.
"Our challenge is to move quickly and to provide alternative opportunities," he said. "We have been fortuitous in the sense that opportunities are coming in the pipeline and are available, particularly in software development."
Mr Martin warned that there was no hope of reversing costs to compete with the levels of cheaper economies, meaning that the economy had to take a different approach.
"We have to have an all-out effort to upskill our population and our workforce to invest very significantly in research and development and science and technology so we can win significant jobs and make back the key competitive differential for the country," he said.
However, opposition politicians are not satisfied with the moves made to address the job cuts.
"Almost 1,000 jobs have been lost in the last week, and yet we have heard little or nothing from the Government on how they plan to address the issue of Ireland's declining competitiveness," said Labour's enterprise spokesman Ruairí Quinn.
"These job losses and company closures, when taken alongside the increase in interest rates by another half percentage point in the next two months, are extremely worrying. More and more hardworking families are going to be pushed to the limits of affordability in their mortgages in coming months. Any family with a mortgage to pay will be extremely worried by these job losses."
