Exporters’ jobs - Figures give some cause for optimism

Exporters created more jobs last year than in any of the previous six years and this — dare we call it a green shoot? — cannot but be welcomed.

Anything that reduces our dreadful unemployment rate is to be treasured, as is any indication that we might, in the fullness of time, redress the draining imbalance between exporting goods or services and exporting people forced to leave to find work and build new lives abroad.

Yesterday Enterprise Ireland reported that Irish exporting companies created 3,804 jobs in 2012 and, even though this figure is tiny when compared to the 432,300 people on the live register, it is far, far more welcome than the by now usual announcement that the momentum continued in the opposite direction and that jobs had been shed in the sector.