WASHINGTON: The latesest figures from the Central Statistics Offfice (CSO) show that Irish unemployment fell to 183,700 in April, down from 187,400 the previous month. This is the lowest level of unemployment since November 2008, when the unemployment rate was 8.1%. The unemployment rate fell by 0.2 percentage points to 8.4% from 8.6% in February and 9.0% at end-2015.
Employment rose in twelve of the fourteen economic sectors on an annual basis and fell in the other two in the final quarter of 2015. The greatest rate of increase was posted in the Construction (+8.5% or 9,900) sector. The pick-up in this sector is particularly encouraging given that it was the one that suffered the worst in the downturn.
Merrion Stockbrokers have today predicted an average jobless rate of 8.2% for 2016, down from 9.4% in 2015 and 11.3% in 2014. Commenting on today’s figures, Minister for Jobs, Richard Bruton said, “There are many significant risks to our continuing recovery – including Brexit, conflict and instability in the Middle East, oil prices, slowdown in China – and yesterday we saw the EU Commission downgrade its forecasts for EU growth.”
He added, “All of this highlights the need to continue making changes in the areas over which we have control – in particular, to do everything possible to improve our international competitiveness. If we are successful in this we will be able to keep the economy strong so that we can make changes and improve services to make people’s lives a little better and a little easier.”
