Austin Hughes

speaker

415 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 19 Jun

Austin Hughes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.

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Breakfast Business with Joe Lynam · Friday's business news review · 21 Nov 2025 podcast

And I will be hopeful about going there and having a good time.

And coming back to look at something a couple of days later, if Ireland beats the Czechs and face Denmark in the final for a World Cup qualification.

So let's live in hope.

Yeah.

Now, for anyone who is the time or interest, these are probably the most reliable and revealing

measure of what's happening in the Irish economy.

And the Q3 numbers suggest that positive momentum is continuing, but it's patchy and not nearly as strong as in recent years.

To give you a sense of it, the numbers at work were about 1% higher than a year earlier, and they've been running about 3% higher for most of the last while.

There were 31,000 more people at work in the third quarter of this year than

12 months earlier.

But the average increase over the previous four quarters was about 81,000.

So quite a slowdown there.

And, you know, what you saw was employment gains in areas like health, education and in the industry were

declines in agriculture, not surprisingly in accommodation and food, perhaps not surprisingly given the tech slowdown in ICT and maybe a bit surprisingly in public administration and that.

So quite mixed in construction numbers flat overall with numbers building houses up and numbers in other construction down.

So it gives you a good sense that it's a patchy economy at the moment and the

The fact that employment growth slowed means that there were more people looking for work.

And in that sense, the unemployment rate rose quite sharply to 5.3 against 4.5 percent.

And that's the highest number since the third quarter of 2021.

It tells you, you know, not that the economy is falling off a cliff.

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