Employment figures - Growth slows but economy is still sound

WE HAVE been under siege from the prophets of doom, each of whom has, like an Old Testament avenger waving his flaming sword, rattled off figures so depressing that they would make a decent man kick his dog.

Though yesterday’s quarterly report from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) was not exactly a laugh a graph it underlined a truth that might be a comfort to most of us. Employment grew by 6,900 or 0.3% over the year, bringing the total number of people at work to 2,108,500. Female employment increased by 21,500, or 2.4%, while male employment declined by 14,600, or 1.2%, over the year.

Though this does not represent the kind of helicopter-to-the-races growth that we have come to imagine as normal over the past few years — the annual growth rate for the second quarter of 2007 was 4.0% — the reality is that there are nearly as many people at work in Ireland as there ever was.