Local jobless figures continue to increase

As Meath's dole queues grew again last month, there have been calls on enterprise agencies to find a new tenant for the vacant Quinn building in Navan. The numbers signing on in Meath rose to 12,350 in July.This is an increase of 257 on the June figure of 12,903 and is also up on the figure for July last year when there were 12,315 on the live register in Meath. The CSO's live register figures show there are significantly more males on the dole in the county than females, with 7,643 men signing on compared to 4,707 women. There are now a total of 2,138 young Meath people, under the age of 25, claiming job seekers allowance. In July, there were 6,207 people on the dole in Navan, up from 6,187 in June. Of these, 1,556 are under the age of 25. Some 3910 men and 2297 women are now on the live register in Navan. The figure for Kells is 2,179, up from 2,103 in June and 359 of those are under 25. Kells has 1,357 men and 822 women signing on in July. The numbers on the live register in Trim also grew, from 3,803 in June to 3,964 last month. The south Meath town now has 723 under 25's signing on, and there are 2,376 men and 1,588 women on the dole in Trim. According to Deputy Peadar Tóibín these are shockingly high figures. "There are thousands of families who are barely able to make ends meet and are struggling on a daily basis with bills due to some of the highest unemployment figures in the county ever," he said. "Hundreds of our best and brightest young people are still being forced to emigrate every year from the county, leaving whole swathes of the county depopulated of that generation". He said there were very few jobs in Meath. "More Meath people leave their county every day to commute to work, than from any other county. The jobs are all in Dublin, Louth and Kildare. This puts major pressure on our local authorities who are massively underfunded due to the low rates base". He said that Meath was a great county to do business in. "It has a young, well educated workforce. It has now got good infrastructural links to get people and products in and about the county quickly, but complacency is the last thing we need. "We have had an enormous increase in population and Kildare, Louth and Wicklow still get more Enterprise Ireland and IDA jobs than we do. The former Quinn Direct office block is sitting idle in Navan and I am calling on all the enterprise development organisations in the country to collectively use their resources to find a suitable tenant and employment for it as soon as possible," he said.