Where in Ireland has seen the biggest increase in unemployment?

My recent post on negative equity led to some discussions, particularly on irisheconomy.ie, about the financial (i.e. NAMA) and labour market (i.e. dole) implications of negative equity. Here, I use Live Register figures to work out which counties have been affected most by unemployment since the start of the recession. A group of counties from Laois up to Cavan appear worst affected, although all counties have seen unemployment at least double.

The Pelosi scare-graph revisited: Private sector job losses and camel recessions

As some of you may know, Nancy Pelosi has been scaring people with graphs, recently. By her metric, namely the absolute numbers of jobs lost, the current recession is more severe – and faster – than the last couple of regressions. Naturally, something that high profile gained a lot of attention and ultimately modification. The [...]

Public Sector pay in Ireland & the €50,000 question: It’s not that difficult!

Watching Monday’s Questions & Answers, I became increasingly baffled as to how poorly understood the gap between public sector and private sector pay in Ireland actually is. I conducted a mini-straw poll, through the various media of living room chat, email and Twitter. That poll made me realise that while I had been labouring under [...]

Wisdom of the crowds? Web2.0, hubdub & guessing Ireland’s unemployment

I had the rather pleasant task today of going through a range of Web 2.0 / social networking tools and establishing the potential in their application to primary research. Some key things that the new generation of web tools can give include: Using something like digg or scribd to find key themes and recent developments [...]