Re-Generation Ireland

Sunday morning, and its the first Sunday in ages I’m up earlier than 12pm, and the first in ages that I haven’t read the SINDO first either. Instead, I’ve been reading the OECD employment report, specifically the report on Ireland.

It makes pretty bleak reading. We are set to hit 15% unemployment in 2010 unless there is a miracle recovery in the next few months, and there is no guarentee that it’ll get any better for years to come. In fact the OECD’s biggest worry is long-term residual unemployment even after we technically come out of recession.

So what are the high-, sorry, low-lights of the Report?

From December 2007 to July 2009, 166 000 individuals joined the ranks of the unemployed and the unemployment rate rose by 7.8 percentage points to reach 12.5%, the second-highest level in the OECD after Spain and the highest percentage increase in the unemployment rate witnessed during the current crisis … in July 2009 more than 1 in 4 under 25’s found themselves unemployed.

Though I have commented on this before, it is staggering still. It would be worse apparently, “but [it] largely reflects the fact that many younger job losers have left the labour market”. Under 25s are emmigrating or returning to education, we are facing into a brain-drain right after a recession. Very very bad…

However in what is as blatent as a slap in the face for Fianna Fáil, the OECD paid praise to the policies pursued by Labour when we were in Governemnt, and recommended more of the same as the solution:

To avoid a return to the high and persistent unemployment of the 1980 and early 1990s, a key priority is to provide effective employment services to a rapidly rising pool of jobseekers and ensure that the most vulnerable of them do not lose contact with the labour market and drift into inactivity. Ireland made some progress in the early 1990s with the implementation of back-to-work policies, where, in return for receiving benefits and re-employment services, recipients are required to participate in job search, training or employment programmes, but this process was not pursued vigorously enough during the boom years. It will be important now to re-invigorate past efforts to develop effective back-to-work policies in order to prevent the large hike in unemployment from casting a long shadow over the future.

Or to quote Labour: JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. Thats how we’ll get out of this mess.