THE progress we have been making in job creation and in reducing the number of people out of work has been obscured by the upward trend of the live register. That register is no more than an administrative system that enumerates the people entitled to certain benefits, whether in terms of payments or credits for future pension purposes - it is not designed to measure the number of people out of work and seeking employment.
A particularly perverse feature of the live register is that many women who have been working at home - often for a period of child caring - and who then enter part time employment are added both to the live register and to the numbers at work. So to some degree one can say that the more part time jobs are created, the more unemployment will be seen as rising by anyone who uses the live register as a measure of the numbers out of work and seeking employment.
That this can be quite a significant factor is evident from the fact that between April 1992 and April 1994 a drop of 17,000 in the number of women working at home coincided with an 18,000 increase in the number of women over 25 engaged in part time employment.
Fortunately we have a better measure of our unemployment problem in the annual Labour Force Survey which is based on a large sample of almost 50,000 households, carried out on an identical basis throughout all the countries of the European Union. In the principal part of this survey the number of unemployed is arrived at by asking those surveyed their usual situation with regard to employment; all those who have lost or given up a previous job, or who are seeking work either after completing their education or after voluntarily interrupting their working life for a year or more, are then counted as unemployed.
Thus whereas the live register recorded a drop of only 18,500 between April 1993 and April 1995, the Labour Force Survey shows a reduction in the total number of unemployed in Ireland of 38,000, or one sixth, in this period. And the Economic and Social Research Institute estimates that by next month unemployment will have fallen by a further 8,000, to 184,000. This forecast may prove too pessimistic, however, because the ESRI's prediction of average unemployment in 1996 is 9,000 higher than that of the Central Bank - and if the Central Bank is right about the annual average, then the April unemployment figure may well turn out to be below 180,000. This would represent a drop of over 50,000 on the April 1993 unemployment level.
THE Central Bank unemployment forecast for the current year shows an 11.8 per cent unemployment a percentage that would be only one point above the forecast EU average. Such a figure would be fractionally higher than in France and Italy, lower than in Belgium, and not much more than half the Spanish figure. (As recently as 1989 Irish unemployment was only one eighth lower than in Spain.)
The sharp fall in our unemployment reflects, of course, the quite dramatic rise in the numbers at work - estimated by the ESRI at 116,000 since 1992.
Given that during these three years almost 90,000 natural vacancies also arose through deaths and retirement, it is clear that the net flow into employment in this period has been well in excess of 200,000. Yet unemployment has fallen by only one quarter of this figure.
The rest of the jobs have gone to those completing their education, to women moving back into employment from a period working at home, and to emigrants returning to take up work here after gaining experience abroad. Incidentally, during this period these returning emigrants brought some 15,000 children back with them, increasing by one tenth the flow of Irish born children into our educational system.
This is a simplified picture of a complex phenomenon: there is a constant ebb and flow of people, into and out of unemployment, averaging about 27,000 in each direction each month.
But these flows have little impact on the many who have been out of work for some time. The most disturbing feature of Irish unemployment is not so much its overall scale - now close to the EU average - as the high proportion of people who have been out of work for a long period.
Only Spain in Europe has a similar long term unemployment problem. Despite the general improvement in the level of Irish unemployment, this long term unemployment phenomenon has not been diminishing. Unfortunately, the only published figures for the duration of unemployment are the unsatisfactory live register figures, the totals of which are misleadingly high. However, it seems likely that the percentages on the live register for various periods of time provide a useful indication of the scale of changes in the duration of unemployment.
And what these figures show is that in the 12 years during 1983-95, the percentage of those on the live register remaining there for a period of over one year has risen from one quarter to over two fifths in the case of those aged under 35, and from three eighths to three fifths in the case of those aged 35-54.
MOREOVER, while in the case of those under 35 the numbers out of work for over a year tend to decline somewhat in periods of rapid employment growth, the number of those aged 35-54 who are out of work for over a year just goes on growing all the time.
Even more disturbing has been the increase in the proportion in this age group that has been on the live register for over three years; this figure had risen to 36 per cent by last October.
These long term unemployed are predominantly men who were early school leavers and who lack marketable skills; as a result they have been left behind in a society where there are few work opportunities for the unskilled. (In the 1991 Census, the unemployment rate for unskilled workers was three times greater than for the rest of the population.) The long term unemployed unskilled are the last group to which most employers will look when seeking workers. Education leavers, returning emigrants with experience and acquired skills, and women who have been working at home for a period will almost; always get preference over them.
Only if a process of re education and of training in some kind of skill is made available to these long term unemployed, and if they have the will and the capacity to take advantage of such an opportunity, can under educated and unskilled workers aged over 35 who have been out of work for a prolonged period have any hope of re-employment today. And for many of this group - perhaps even a majority - a re entry to the workforce through such a process is simply not practicable.
Many of these workers have families, and under present circumstances their children have a below average chance of avoiding a repetition of this cycle of disadvantage. Unless we can re orientate our social and educational provisions towards a targeting of such families, the prospects for many of these children are quite grim. And targeting areas of acute disadvantage does not come easily to any part of a public service whose ethic of ensuring equitable treatment for all tends to be translated all too readily into equal treatment for all, regardless of widely varying needs.
There are signs that this difficulty is increasingly being recognised and faced within our political and administrative system. But, to take just one example: we now have 6,600 more staff in our schools than in 1989, teaching 75,000 fewer pupils than were in the schools in that year. Just what proportion of this additional teaching capacity has been allocated - as was promised in a Green Paper some years ago - to schools in under privileged areas?
I fear we still have a long way to go before our aspirations to social equity are translated into concrete action in areas such as this.