I propose to take Questions Nos. 8 and 42 together.
The number of redundancies notified to my Department in the years mentioned was 13,316 in 2000, 19,977 in 2001, 25,358 in 2002, and 20,150 in the period from January to September 2003. Notified redundancies in September 2003 were 61% higher than in September 2002. However, the pattern over many years is that the number of redundancies fluctuated substantially from month to month. A more meaningful comparison would be January to September when notified redundancies were 4.6% higher this year than the corresponding period last year.
The increased level of redundancies reflects slower economic activity in Ireland in line with difficult economic conditions worldwide. Although the Irish economy performed sluggishly in the first half of 2003, growth is expected to pick up next year as conditions in the global economy continue to improve.
However, given the open nature of the Irish economy, the Government's focus will be on maintaining competitiveness which is critical to sustaining and developing the manufacturing and international traded service sectors. Enterprise development here is facing a number of challenges, including significantly reduced export growth, increased competition from low-cost locations and cost and other factors adversely impacting on competitiveness.
Ireland's ability to compete with the emerging markets of central Europe, India and China for services and manufacturing activities that drove our earlier success is hampered by the rising cost of doing business here. Our strategic response must be informed by these realities and by the certainty that competition, resulting from globalisation and technological change, will continue to intensify. The changed domestic and global economic context means that Ireland's enterprise policy, which drove our success in the 1990s, based on the advantages of a plentiful supply of skilled and relatively inexpensive labour, a flexible business environment and low corporation tax, will no longer suffice. Future enterprise policy should facilitate the State and industry to create the conditions that will make possible a sustained shift to higher skill, higher value added and a more knowledge-intensive enterprise economy.