4,000 staff facing the axe as bailed-out banks plan cuts
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STAFF at the country's two biggest banks are bracing themselves for news of up to 4,000 job losses over the coming weeks.
Taxpayer-backed Allied Irish Banks (AIB) and Bank of Ireland (BoI), which have received billions in state funding, are preparing for more cuts on top of the 3,000 lay-offs already made since the banking crisis started.
AIB could lay off as many as 3,000 people this time round.
Many of those expected to be affected supply support services to the bank's overseas businesses in Poland, the UK and the US, all of which are for sale.
A spokesman for AIB said yesterday that the bank was not ruling out lay-offs but added that there were "no advanced plans".
However, sources at the bank expect job losses to run into four figures.
At Bank of Ireland, up to 1,000 lay-offs are expected to be announced over the next two weeks.
"We have been aligning our costs with new, lower levels of business activity throughout the group and we are committed to continuing this," said a spokeswoman. She declined to comment further.
Bank of Ireland is also selling off a number of divisions including New Ireland Assurance and ICS Building Society in order to meet the terms of a European Union restructuring plan.
News of the job losses, which come just days after the latest live register figures showed a record number of 450,000 people seeking unemployment benefits, is expected to dominate Dail debate in the last week before the summer recess.
The news also comes as a blow to the Government which has already had to pump €3.5bn each into AIB and Bank of Ireland following the financial crisis, with the State now owning 18.6pc and 36pc of the institutions respectively.
Opposition parties yesterday described the losses as more evidence that the Government did not have a jobs policy as the economy continues to suffer.
Fine Gael spokesman on enterprise, Richard Bruton, said: "The only way to confront our jobs crisis is to develop a coherent economic strategy, which should include developing key economic arteries like broadband, energy and water."
He also advocated "developing the sectors that still offer us real job prospects such as tourism, education as an international sector, and a restructuring of the State to deliver more with less".
The Labour Party's Joan Burton said she would be raising the issue of the latest redundancies in the Dail next week.
Taxes
"Every job lost costs the Exchequer in the region of €20,000 through lost taxes and additional social welfare payments," she said.
She added that the Government had focused all its attention on saving the banking sector -- but it was the real economy that was suffering.
In the telecoms sector, informed sources have played down reports of another 2,000 redundancies at debt-laden Eircom, which currently employs about 8,000 staff. However, the company has said in the past it was not ruling out further job losses outside of the current 1,200 redundancy programme as it battles to reduce its debt of €3bn.
The executive council of the Communications Workers Union will meet this week to discuss its ongoing negotiations with Eircom on the future of the company.
Meanwhile, banking union IBOA said it had not entered into negotiations with the two banks on additional redundancies. It added that the two banks had laid off about 3,000 people between them in the past two years.
State-controlled Anglo Irish Bank announced plans for over 200 redundancies at the end of last year, but still employs over 1,300 people.
- Ailish O'Hora and John Mulligan
Irish Independent
