Jobless figures fall by nearly 9%

THE number of people claiming unemployment assistance or benefit dropped by almost 9% last month as job creation rates continued to outpace redundancies.

Even when adjusted for seasonal factors, such as students leaving the summer labour market to return to college, the latest live register figures still show a decrease of 1.7%.

The Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU) welcomed the reductions but warned against complacency.

“There are still over 160,000 people claiming an unemployment payment,” said INOU general secretary, Eric Conroy.

He urged new Enterprise, Trade and Employment Minister Micheál Martin to create employment opportunities that reflected the needs of the lower-skilled, long-term unemployed.

“The strive for creating a high-tech knowledge-based labour force is recommended but not to the detriment of those who may never attain those types of jobs.

“The job creation policies must reflect the diverse labour supply on offer,” he said.

The September reduction of 8.7% means 15,350 people stopped signing on for the full dole or part-time unemployment payments in the last month. It reverses the trend evident in the earlier part of the year and brings the annual decrease since January to 6.1%.

Last month’s decrease was spread nationwide with the greatest falls experienced in the west and mid-west regions, at 10.2% and 10.1% respectively, and the smallest reductions recorded in the south-west and Dublin, 7.2% and 7.5% respectively.

On a county by county basis Roscommon fared best, seeing 14.3% fewer people on the register, while Wexford had the least dramatic improvement with a 5.9% decrease.

More than two-thirds of those who came off the register nationally were women.