So we have more austerity and less growth, more debt and less jobs, more spending cuts and less investment - welcome to the Government’s Medium-Term Fiscal Statement.
You have to hand it to the authors of the 4-Year plan - they can really turn a phrase in the face of reality.  Try this one on:
‘The economy [...]

In a single line buried in today’s Quarterly National Household Survey Report, the CSO just made the future a bit bleaker.
In February, the Live Register recorded an unemployment rate of 13.5 percent.
With the publication of the QNHS, the CSO has revised this figure (a regular occurrence).
Now the February Live Register records an unemployment rate of [...]

Long-term unemployment is the worst part of any jobless figures. We can deal with frictional unemployment (a temporary period during which people change jobs). Even short-term unemployment can be dealt with - through re-training, back-to-education, temporary employment measures. But long-term unemployment (LTU) represents a terrible drain on the households who experience it, on the economy [...]

Even their interior designer does not think much of the Tories!!
I have no doubt that you share my bone-shivering outrage and anger and also fist-clenching teeth-grinding mouth-foaming hair-splitting frustration at the failures of the police in both Ireland and England to kill any atheist communist students over the past 20 years [...]

The seasonally adjusted unemployment figures show a fall of 6,500 signing on the live register. This is totally due to emigration.  In fact, it is highly likely that the figures would have risen and not fallen, were it not for the scale of emigration right now, which is the now at its highest annual level [...]

The crisis is deepening within our society, current and future generation of working people, small businesses, family farmers, self-employed, the growing ranks of unemployed and the poor are and will be forced to pay a heavy price for a system that is incapable of delivering a just and equatable society.
It is being kept alive [...]

Sinead Pentony: “The problem is unemployment - not the unemployed”.
Responding to reports that those receiving unemployment assistance could be coerced into taking up “social employment” positions through the threat of losing income supports, TASC Head of Policy Sinead Pentony said today making such schemes mandatory was unnecessary and would simply serve to stigmatise participants.

Why did I think the Ernst & Young forecasts wouldn’t make big news? Did I really imagine that its key projections on the deficit and employment would provide a sobering counter-point to all the ‘whistling past the economic graveyard’ commentary we get everyday. Yet, the analysis is worth poring over in detail, not because E&Y [...]

Details on the Youth Unemployment Conference Hosted by Ógra Shinn Féin

When? 11am, Saturday the 5th of June

Where? The Teachers Club, Parnell Square, Dublin

What?
Ógra Shinn Féin has announced the final clár of their forthcoming National Youth Unemployment Conference, to be held in the Teachers Club in Dublin on Saturday the 5th of June  11am.

First, the good news. The rise in unemployment is contracting. From a monthly high of 36,500 new people on the Live Register, the rise last month was a mere 4,300. Okay, still far too high but if unemployment is ever to be reversed it must first be slowed down. And slowing down it is. That’s [...]