Friday's business news review
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What are the main business stories covered today?
Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk. Good morning and welcome to Breakfast Business and thank you to Eamon Torsney. It is Friday, the 21st of November at 6.31. Happy World Vasectomy Day to all those who celebrate. Coming up on today's show, we'll be talking to the EU Research Agency about whether the European social model might be too generous. And we'll be chatting to the founder of the exclusive footwear brand, Dune, and all the markets as usual. You can email us business at newstalk.com. But first, let's have a look at the main business stories in the newspapers and websites, which we shall do in the exalted and never over-excited company of Austin Hughes. Good morning, Austin.
Good morning, Joe.
I don't want to sound too upbeat after that intro. Indeed. Have you ever been to Prague? Several times, yeah. Beautiful city. It really is. If you can avoid the crowds and the stag and hen part, it's even nicer.
And will you be going, out of curiosity, at the end of March for a visit?
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.
Yes, I see you're ruling out North Macedonia, making that final. Anyway, let's start with a little bit of business. The latest jobs data from the CSO was out yesterday. It was a little bit worrying, though, wasn't it?
Yes.
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. It's not like that at all.
But perhaps the overheating concerns are a little bit overdone. Now, again, when you dig into the detail, and there's loads of detail in terms of this, the largest increase in terms of absolute numbers at work was in ages 25 to 34. But if you look at the percentage increases, the largest increase was in the over 65s. And we saw a decline in numbers aged under 25 at work. which also led to an increase in unemployment among younger people. And that sort of, you know, as I say, two or three speed economy is very clear in these sort of numbers. Younger people probably finding it hard to get a job in a country. a labour market that's cooling, where companies are being a little bit more cautious. And there's also a very clear educational divide.
If you look at numbers with third level qualifications are now 43% of those in employment. They're up, but anyone with secondary school or lower qualifications, there's fewer people like that working than a year ago. So a lot of information on the economy. Also quite revealing, the numbers of Irish citizens working roughly flat in the last year and most of the employment gains, net employment gains seen in non-Irish citizens, predominantly those coming from outside the EU and UK.
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