Employment Data
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-13
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Niamh Smyth (FF), Cavan-Monaghan

I thank the Deputy very much for her important question. The programme for Government sets out a strong enterprise and fiscal framework that prioritises economic and employment growth and competitiveness. I am pleased to report that the Irish labour market saw sustained employment growth, rising labour force participation and record job numbers last year, indicative of a resilient performance.
In total, over 2.8 million people are now employed in Ireland, with employment up 61,500 on average in the first nine months of the year and with the pace of job creation slowing as the year progressed. Ireland’s labour market performance compares very favourably with the performances of our European counterparts. Ireland’s youth unemployment rate, at 14% as of December, is well below the rates of our European peers, namely 15.2% in the EU and 14.8% in the euro area. That said, we are continuing to monitor the unemployment rate. Several of the Government’s initiatives will be central in this regard, not least our ambitious investment plans and, of course, the Action Plan on Competitiveness and Productivity, published last year by the Minister, Deputy Peter Burke. The Government remains fully committed to improving our competitive position to add more jobs in the future. The action plan has a range of measures to address and build a more resilient economy.
Another important document will be the successor strategy to Pathways to Work 2021-2025, which is overseen by the Department of Social Protection. In fact, the Department has concluded public consultation on this as we look to develop a new strategy. The programme for Government was clear on our ambition here, which is to create 300,000 additional jobs by 2030.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-13