Unemployment and emigration, the twin diseases that blighted Ireland in the 1980s before its economic boom, are returning to ail the country after the bust.

The jobless rate will probably remain above 14 percent through the next year, according to economists at Allied Irish Banks Plc and Ulster Bank in Dublin. That’s double the level of three years ago. The unemployment rate was 14.2 percent in June and the statistics office will publish July data at 11 a.m. tomorrow. Meanwhile, more people are leaving the country than at any time since 1989.

 

“Things are desperate,” Joe Cox, 51, who lost his job 11 months ago after running a hardware store before Ireland’s property bubble imploded, said outside a welfare office in Dublin. “Employers don’t even reply a lot of the time.”

While the pain of austerity is kicking in for the growing ranks of unemployed in Europe’s most indebted nations, Ireland has history catching up with it after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy and Europe’s worst banking crisis.

 

Irish modern history has been marked by emigration since the Great Famine, which began in 1845. The population shrank by more than a third to 2.8 million in 100 years through 1961. Unemployment averaged about 14 percent between 1992 and 1996, before an influx of overseas investment sparked a boom.

The jobless rate plunged to as low as 3.7 percent even as emigrants returned home and east Europeans poured into Ireland seeking work before the boom shuddered to a halt in 2008.

 

Full article on Bloomberg

By Finbarr Flynn and Colm Heatley - Aug 3, 2011