Even if you belong to that large group who believe economists’ forecasts should be taken as seriously as imminent predictions of the second coming, a calculation that 240,000 people will still be looking for a job in 12 months should make you sit up.
Everyone knows that Covid-19 restrictions sent unemployment rocketing. It hit a record 695,000, or 28.2 per cent, during the most severe spring lockdown in April. This eased as many businesses reopened, and thankfully stayed that way through the summer.
Nevertheless it is still high. Worse still, if the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)is right, it will stay that way for some time. Research professor Kieran McQuinn and senior research director Conor O’Toole say that unemployment will remain at 15 per cent for much of next year, falling to around 10 per cent in 12 months’ time.
That is 240,000 people facing Christmas 2021 without a job following a year for which much of the time 360,000 workers will be looking for employment.
There are a lot of variables at play here – the speed of vaccination, the strength or otherwise of a rebound as normality returns, and, of course, Brexit. So it could be better, or it could even be worse.
However, one thing is certain, a lot of people will not have a job in 12 months, and will have spent more than a year out of work.
That means they will be long-term unemployed. That’s not just a phrase. It means that hundreds of thousands of families will be without at least one breadwinner in a country where most need two, for a sustained period, nudging them over the poverty line.
Whether or not you agree that the Government’s response to the pandemic was right, it is now clear that it will leave thousands of people, who would otherwise have expected to have a job, without one.
If the economists are right this time, the State will be grappling with that problem long after we’ve consigned Covid-19 to memory.
