The Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Ireland released some figures from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) from Q1 2018. from the beginning of Q3 2017.
The figures show that in the first 3 months of 2018, ther were 2,220,500 people in employment, up 2.9% or 62,100 from the same quarter in 2017. When adjusted for seasonal factors, employment increased by 0.7% or 15,700 from Q4 2017.
There were 132,900 people unemployed in Q1 2018 and this was down 18.6% or 30,500 from Q1 2017. When seasonally adjusted, the unemployment rate fell from 6.4% to 5.8% over the quarter, while the seasonally adjusted number of persons unemployed was 137,300.
Long term unemployment, which refers to those persons unemployed for one year or more, accounted for 37.7% of total unemployment in Q1 2018.
The total number of persons in the labour force is now 2,353,400, up 1.4% or 31,700 from Q1 2017. The number of persons not in the labour force is 1,470,500 which is up 1.1% or 16,400 from a year earlier .