Austin Hughes

Beautiful city.

It really is.

If you can avoid the crowds and the stag and hen part, it's even nicer.

I may well.

I'm not sure yet, but certainly somewhere I'd like to be.

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.