The figures below are based on the Quarterly Household Survey reports of employment by SOC classification. They relate to the changes in employment from the fourth quarter 2008 to the fourth quarter 2009.
The Quarterly Household Survey is a sample survey, details of which are outlined here.

You may have noticed a report launched by TASC yesterday, Mapping the Golden Circle, which shows how few people, mainly men, held so many directorships on the boards of Ireland’s major private and state-owned companies between 2005 and 2007.
The report is available on the TASC site here; it was discussed extensively on Tonight with Vincent [...]

Continuing on from our August 2009 post on the Quarterly Household Survey (QHS), Q1 2009, this is a look at employment and unemployment in the Republic, Oct-Dec ‘08 to Oct-Dec ‘09, based on the QHS Q4 2009.
We know that due to the government’s active pursuit of deflation, Ireland’s GNP shrank by world-beating 11.3% in 2009. [...]

Ostensibly an official history, John Cunningham’s study of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI), and its relationship with the education system, also touches on four key elements of Irish society over the past 100 years: religion, class, politics and economics. It looks at the changes in Ireland since the foundation of the association [...]

The proper meaning of class, as it is used in an analysis of political economy and sociology internationally, is not much discussed in Ireland either in academia or more broadly, despite the overriding fact that so much of how the economic crisis has played out and how the government here has chosen to deal with [...]

Since the 1990s, anthropologists working in Ireland have increasingly concerned themselves with ideas of class and class relations. Previously, the central themes were rural life, community, kinship and social structure. In 1932 Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball undertook a two-year study of small communities in Co. Clare. The resultant publications, An Irish Countryman [...]

Sometimes, something happens that takes your breath away. The chain store Boots is engaged in a deplorable assault on their employees’ wages and working conditions - employees who are some of the lowest paid in the economy. Not only that, it constitutes an assault upon other enterprises, the Exchequer and the Irish economy.
Let’s do some [...]

In 2003 the Bare Necessities report by independent think-tank Democratic Dialogue revealed that nearly 30% of Northern Ireland’s households were poor. According to the report, in 2002-03 half a million people in Northern Ireland were living in poor households of whom148,900 were children (37.4 per cent of all children).According to the report, “based on the [...]

What kind of recession are we having - or rather, how is it impacting on different sectors of the labour force? Some time ago we heard talk of a middle-class recession - how particular ‘middle class’ occupations were being badly affected. Architects were one such profession and clearly there’s not much use for this group [...]