GOOGLE EXPANDS IN IRELAND
Google is to establish an operations centre at the Eastpoint Business Park in Dublin, creating 200 jobs. The centre will look after the technology firm’s location-based products, such as Google Maps and Google Local.
Tag: jobs
THE ONLY WAY IS UP?
The OECD became the latest forecaster to raise its forecast for the Irish economy which it did last month as part of its twice-yearly Economic Outlook.
The latest projection from the Paris-based policy advice body envisages that the Irish economy will contract by 0.7% on average this year in GDP terms, much less than the 2.3% decline projected in its previous forecast round in November. Moreover, its forecast for next year was revised up by even more. The economy is now expected to grow by 3% in 2011, up considerably from the 1% it was pencilling in in November.
COLLAPSE IN RESEARCH FUNDING
Trinity College Dublin (TCD) is predicting its research funding will collapse over the next five years, leading to a loss of 1,000 jobs.
WE NEED A GAMES AMBASSADOR
Playing games is a serious business. Video games that is – and in Ireland it is getting ever more serious. According to the IDA, the sector employs 1,500 people and that doesn’t include two jobs announcements for a total of 300 people last week.
RECESSION IS OVER SAYS ENTERPRISE IRELAND
The chief executive of Enterprise Ireland, Frank Ryan, has declared that the recession is over. In an article in the Sunday Tribune he said that exports at companies backed by the state agency were rising again, after plunging 10 per cent last year.
GRANTS MEAN GOOD BUSINESS FOR SMEs
There is good news at the door for small-scale businesses operating in Ireland. County & City Enterprise Boards (CEBs) are continuing to provide a range of financial supports designed to assist with the establishment and/or growth of businesses employing up to ten people.
WORK & WELFARE SCHEME TO BE LAUNCHED BY GOVT.
A major change to the social welfare system will allow job-seekers to continue to receive full benefits while working in the private sector – if they also carry out community work. The Minister For Social Protection, Eamon O Cuiv, is to roll out a new “hybrid” social welfare scheme where people who do 19.5 hours community work a week will be able to take up jobs.
VIRTUAL JOB INTERVIEWS
Ireland’s biggest jobs site, Irishjobs.ie, has signed a deal with a technology company which will provide it with the software to allow companies to conduct virtual interviews. Irish technology firm Sonru.com has also sold the technology to other companies such as Eircom and eBay, the online auctioneering company whose European headquarters are in Dublin.
POLITICS
Imagine your chances of keeping your job if you didn’t bother showing up? Yet, just 17 of the country’s 166 TDs turned up for work at Leinster House every day in the first two weeks after a clocking-in system was introduced on March 1.
FAS
A training programme designed to get the long-term unemployed back to work cost the state almost €900,000 for every participant and not a single one of them found a job afterwards, the Sunday Business Post reports.
The Job Training Initiative had a budget of €39m in 2008 and 46 people completed it. A new report by Forfás, the state advisory board, is recommending a massive overhaul of this and other employment schemes to ensure better value for money.
“It is considered that the employment programmes … are not well aligned to deliver the strategic policy response required for the new labour market environment,” according to Forfás.
In other words, they are a complete waste of time and taxpayers’ money.
BILL CULLEN: I’LL TAKE ON O’LEARY, ANYTIME
In the Hangar 6 row, the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) rolled out a howitzer at the weekend and turned it on Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary. High-profile millionaire Bill Cullen, who has been a non-executive director of the DAA for the past five years, said that O’Leary was all ego and no integrity. “It’s all about publicity with him. He might dress down. He might wear the jeans and the oul’ shirt and all that stuff but that’s all an act. He has a huge ego,” Cullen said in a speech to students at NUI, Maynooth that was widely quoted in the Sunday Independent.
Cliff Hanger
Who’d have thought that a largely deserted aircraft hangar at Dublin airport would have dominated the media headlines for best part of three weeks? Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary has been dogging Hangar 6 at Dublin Airport with the ferocity of a disgruntled Rottweiler and if we are to judge by the weekend newspapers he is not finished yet. If nothing else O’Leary will wring maximum embarrassment for the Government out of this story.
New Focus on Jobs
Ever heard of the “bric markets”? No, they have nothing to do with the construction industry collapse or the building bubble. They are, in fact, the fast-growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China and according to the Sunday Times, the IDA is to focus on them for green-field investment in a new programme to be announced next month.