Never in the history of the State have so many people been out of work, Fine Gael Enterprise Spokesman Leo Varadkar TD said today as the live register climbed by 13,300 in the last month.

“At the end of last year the Government was trumpeting a slowdown in the number of people joining the live register. Fianna Fáil has successfully thrown this into reverse, with the live register accelerating dramatically back to five figure job losses per month. The increase of 13,341 in the month is a dead cat bounce for unemployment levels. Without the pressure valves of emigration and further education, the live register would now stand at half a million.

“Every job loss is a tragedy for the individual and their family. And this is a tragedy which Brian Cowen has personally presided over. There were 202,000 on the live register when Brian Cowen became Taoiseach. This has more than doubled to almost 437,000 under his tenure.

“The thousands of people losing their jobs and livelihoods won’t take any comfort from Government delusions that the worst is over, particularly when tax revenues continue to plummet and redundancies are soaring.

“Not only is Fianna Fáil deluding itself by talking up a recovery, it has failed to take the right steps to bring about job creation. Fine Gael, however, has put job creation at the heart of its economic plans: an SME survival plan to bring about real reform and reduce costs, a jobs tax cut to give a break to businesses and their 1.7 million employees, a stimulus plan to create 100,000 new jobs while investing in essential infrastructure for future job growth, and a dedicated package of policies targeting the 85,900 young people on the live register.

“This is in stark contrast to Fianna Fáil’s misguided determination to continue bailing out banks like Anglo Irish with billions of euros of taxpayers’ money.”