Dublin Opinion

I’ve been looking at the quarterly household survey from 2008 to 2010Q1 and the upward trend in short-hours (1 to 29 hrs a week) tapered off at the end of 2009 and was flat until March.

This is a very tentative conclusion, but we know that businesses were putting people on short hours rather than laying them off, and what appears to be going on now is that those businesses that were struggling have:

a) now collapsed,
b) started laying off people instead of giving them shorter hours.

I have to say, if this turns out to be the case - and we’ll know at the end of September when the figures for Q2 QHS are out - it’s a a very, very sad state of affairs.

Those businesses were hanging on in there for months but the sustained deflationary attack by Fianna Fail just finished them off.

These were businesses which were still alive up to March, but Fianna Fail killed them.