Teen unemployment - Education the key to solving crisis

Considerably more absorbing than the Central Statistics Office revelation that the number of people working in the economy had passed the two million mark for the first time, was the shocking figure for teenage unemployment.

While the CSO news, relating to the second quarter of this year, is to be very much welcomed, there can be no comfort whatsoever in the fact that unemployment among Irish teenagers more than doubled in the three years to 2004.

That figure was produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and referred to young people between 15 and 19 years. What is more, it showed that 8.5% of them were neither in education nor had jobs.