Young people should be able to find a well-paid job and build a life in Ireland
Over the last five years, the number of Irish citizens emigrating has been steadily increasing, reaching 35,400 in the latest figures.
Across the country, 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds have recently received their Leaving Cert results and are looking forward to the next stage of their lives.
This is a generation that never knew the Celtic Tiger. Born between 2006 and 2008, their lives span only the economic crisis and the protracted recovery that followed. But how has this recovery performed for them?
While youth unemployment has fallen dramatically, that does not mean Ireland is working for young people. Fewer are participating in the labour market, housing has become dramatically less affordable, and many are contemplating emigration.
First, the good news. When the recession hit in 2008, unemployment among those aged 15-24 skyrocketed from less than 10% to 25% in just over a year. By 2012, it had reached 32%. This meant that for every two young people in employment, there was one young person looking for work.
Fortunately, over the subsequent decade, the youth unemployment rate declined steadily until it reached around 10-11%, where it has remained for the last five years. While this remains higher than the youth unemployment rates of 7-9% recorded before the crash, it nevertheless represents a very significant improvement. Also important is the proportion of 18 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment, or training. Once again, this rose sharply during the recession, more than doubling from 9.5% in 2007 to 19.4% by 2010. But over the past 13 years, that proportion has steadily declined. Today, only 6.4% of young people in Ireland are not in education, employment, or training, well below the EU average of 9%.
However, these positive numbers conceal a more troubling story. This becomes particularly visible when we turn from unemployment to the number of young people actually in work. The recovery has seen a remarkable increase in jobs numbers in Ireland. Today, there are more than 2.8m people in employment. Of those, the vast majority are those aged 25 or older. After falling from 1.82m to 1.66m between 2008 and 2012, the number has increased steadily, and today there are nearly 2.5m people aged 25 or older in employment. However, the experience of those aged under 25 has been a completely different matter.
In the decade prior to the crash, around 400,000 young people were in employment. While this number fluctuated seasonally by up to around 40,000, the number of young people in employment was remarkably stable over this period. But during the recession, youth employment collapsed from 441,200 in 2007 to 189,600 in 2012. Since then, the number has gradually increased but, unlike for those aged 25 and older, the employment numbers have, to this day, never returned to pre-crisis levels. By 2021, 320,600 young people were in employment and, over the last five years, youth employment numbers have sat at around that level.
To be clear, this is not due to a fall in population. There are more young people in Ireland today than before the crash. This is a story of declining labour market participation. Nor is this the only problem facing young people.
Having a job once enabled young adults to leave home and establish an independent life. Today, employment increasingly fails to provide that possibility. Over the last 10 years, monthly rents have more than doubled, rising from around €800 in 2015 to €1,755 in late 2025. Wages have not remotely kept pace with this increase. This is a particular issue for young people who are frequently employed on very low wages and can legally be paid less than the full national minimum wage of €14.15 an hour. Those aged under 20 are only entitled to a fraction of the minimum wage entitlements of those aged 20 and older. For those under 18, the legal minimum can be as low as €9.91 an hour.
In these circumstances, it is unsurprising that so many young adults are living with their parents. A 2022 Eurofound survey revealed that 40% of working people aged between 25 and 34 were living at home with their parents. This was a dramatic increase from 27% in 2017 and contrasted sharply with other EU member states such as Sweden and Finland, where only 2% of this age group lived with their parents.
When asked whether they agreed with the statement ‘I feel left out of society’, 44% of young people in Ireland said they did. This was the highest proportion in the EU. The same survey also asked young people about plans to emigrate. In Ireland, 61% of young people said they were planning to, or wished to, move to a different country. Once again, this was the highest proportion seen in the EU.
Against this background, Ireland’s high level of emigration, particularly among younger adults, is unsurprising. A story that we sometimes hear is that, although emigration increased during the recession, this largely reflected the return migration of recently arrived Eastern European immigrants. This was only part of the story. While this return migration mattered, particularly during 2008-2009, changes in overall emigration were driven principally by Irish citizens leaving the country.
Emigration by Irish citizens increased from around 13,000 before the recession to nearly 50,000 in 2012, before declining again to around 25,000 in 2018. However, over the last five years, the number of Irish citizens emigrating has been steadily increasing, reaching 35,400 in the latest figures. This is substantially closer to the recession-era peak than to the pre-crisis level.
Emigration is concentrated among people at the stages of life when they would ordinarily be entering work, establishing careers, and becoming economically independent. Looking at emigrants of all citizenships, between 25,000 and 30,000 people aged 15-44 left Ireland each year during the 15 years before the crash. This figure increased to around 65,000 a year during the recession. Although this subsequently declined, it has increased substantially again in recent years, reaching 58,100 in 2024. Once again, these emigration figures are closer to those recorded during the worst years of the recession than to those of the pre-recession years.
Those heading off to university over the coming weeks have grown up in the shadow of the recession and during the recovery that followed. They are entitled to the opportunity to work, leave home, and establish an independent life that was available to many young people 20 years ago. While Ireland has recovered strongly from the youth unemployment crisis of the early 2010s, it does not provide an economy in which young people can confidently plan secure and independent lives. Young people are entitled to more than the absence of unemployment; they are entitled to work that pays enough to leave home, build a secure life, and imagine a future in their own country.
Oisín Gilmore is senior economist at TASC. He is the author of the recently published National Youth Council of Ireland report ‘Youth Unemployment and the Youth Guarantee in Ireland’.
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