Ireland’s growing headline unemployment figures mask a mix of age- and sector-related trends.
But for all the complexity behind the figures, there is a cohort of young people who simply feel excluded from the world of work.
Just over 5 per cent of the workforce is without a job, according to the latest Central Statistics Office (CSO) labour force survey.
But the picture is much bleaker for young people when it comes to employment: the unemployment rate for those aged between 15 and 24 is almost three times that overall figure. It stands at 14.1 per cent and has risen from 11.5 per cent in a year.
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For those aged between 15 and 19, the rate is higher again, at 19.9 per cent, up by almost a third since the end of 2024.
In The Den, the youth service run by the charity Crosscare in Finglas, north Dublin, staff try to help local young people into employment by linking them up with training or further education courses. It is intended to build their CVs and help with preparation for interviews.
Getting them across a table from someone who might hire them remains an enormous challenge.
“You apply for 100 jobs and 95 don’t get back to you,” says 18-year-old Conor Maxwell, who lives locally and regularly comes to the centre, where his mother, Janis, works.
“Three might get back and one or two might say: ‘Come to an interview.’ But it’s slim pickings trying to get a job.”
Part of the work Janis does is to find jobs the young people might get if they apply.
“I’d often go through the websites and it would be pages eight, nine or 10 before I’d find something suitable. There might be 300 jobs and you’d be printing off three that were suitable for the young people. They’re all looking for experience and a lot of them are looking for the full driving licence,” she says.
Experience is a key stumbling block, she says. The centre can send young people it believes suitable on a forklift driving course, for instance, and there is demand for the skill, but jobs routinely require experience of six months and few manage to get that far.
Some young people the centre deals with have been referred after coming to the attention of the Garda, but staying involved is a choice and, given the local employment landscape, staff don’t believe their job prospects are any different from others from the area.
What is a factor is the generally low level of qualification, with many lacking a Junior Cert and others, the staff say, adversely impacted by a “professionalisation” of the apprenticeship system.
“Our apprenticeship system is great but they have made it quite elite,” says Janis, citing electrical apprenticeships, which would be a common ambition.
[ Unemployment in State at 4.9% in NovemberOpens in new window ]
“It used to be you just had to have a Junior Cert but now you need your traditional Leaving Cert. Certainly you need the maths, and a lot of employers are looking for them to already have their full, clean driving licence. Starting off, that’s too much to ask.”
There are still routes into these programmes without the Leaving Cert but in reality almost all successful applicants have the Leaving Cert.
The team at The Den routinely find teenagers have been diverted into the Leaving Cert Applied (LCA), “where they thrive”, but they then effectively find themselves excluded from the career they wanted to pursue.
Janis also points to the hairdressing profession, where young women traditionally “started sweeping the floor, then worked their way up”. Now, she says, there is a greater college element and related emphasis on educational requirements.
Her colleague Val Farrell spoke to local farriers about taking on apprentices – there is a lot of local interest in horses and the work is well paid, she says – but was told the off-site training element has made it less attractive to take someone on.
Conor suggests the school curriculum is a big issue with young people, as he has struggled to see its relevance in the working world. The more practical nature of courses he has taken since leaving school make far more sense to him, he says.
Ciara Murphy, the centre’s manager, acknowledges this is an issue mentioned by many young people who have passed through its programmes over the four years she has been there, and she is strongly supportive of the more practically orientated LCA.
“In an area like this, though, I think even the schools are often just trying to survive. They’re just trying to get as many kids to stay in school and sometimes they get them to do the LCA because they stay longer,” she says.
All the staff have heard stories of local teacher shortages and Conor says he knows of a school where a class went through an entire Leaving Cert cycle without a full-time woodwork teacher but with a succession of substitutes.
Farrell also points to the long waiting lists for assessments of needs, an assessment carried out by the HSE for young people with a disability. The delays, she believes, can deprive children of the supports they need for their development.
Outside of traditional trades, there are diminishing options for young people short on recognised skills, with Murphy suggesting that jobs such as those in supermarkets have dried up because of self-checkout lanes and other technological changes.
Looming large over all of this is the attraction presented by the seemingly easy money from criminality, with local gangs paying kids to run errands, which can often be an early entanglement from which some never extract themselves.
“It’s in front of you, a full Sunday dinner on a plate. It’s just a question of whether you stay away from it,” says Conor.
Karl McDermott, a youth justice worker, says those who have become disheartened about their prospects of getting work or have issues at home are most vulnerable.
“If the young fellas are getting disheartened, people smell it,” he says.
“There’ll be someone whose ma might be an addict, or they’re in a single-parent family and there’s not much money in the house. People smell that and they offer them €300 or whatever to do something. And when you’re in, it’s hard to get out again.”
“There’s a lot of money in it when you’re younger and you can do things without serious consequences,” says Murphy.
Nathan Ronan (20) did just that: he became embroiled with “the wrong crowd” after leaving school at 16 with no qualifications.
“You got people that tell you to go do this, you go do that, and then they just give you ... wherever you want. I experienced all that but thank God I got away from it,” he says.
He wishes, he says, that he had his time in school to do again. Now, he is trying to get work as a warehouse operative or stores assistant.
“But they’re pretty hard to find,” he says.
All told, he has applied for about 200 jobs, he estimates, the vast majority of which don’t even generate a response.
He busies himself coaching a couple of local football teams, hoping to keep younger kids involved in the game, and is doing some volunteering at the centre. About 200 young people pass through it each week, availing of arts, cookery and other facilities. There is a breakfast club, pool competitions and, for the older ones, all of the employment supports.
Murphy says they are well resourced, with a budget of about €1.2 million providing for 19 full- and part-time staff but she reckons they would quickly have as many users again if there was the money to open a similar centre in West Finglas.
[ What is an apprenticeship - and what are the benefits?Opens in new window ]
The national statistics on young people and work are not all bad; the most recent CSO labour force survey showed an increase in the number of young people working. But youth employment was up too, the result of a spike in births between 2007 and 2012 that is now starting to be seen in the workforce.
CSO statistician Colin Hanley says that while the proportion of young people in the labour force has remained unchanged at 15 per cent over the past decade, the proportion of people who are unemployed between the ages of 15 and 24 has gone from 25 per cent to 35 per cent.
“Among 15 to 19 year-olds it has gone from 9 per cent to 17 per cent,” he says.
Michael McLoughlin of the National Youth Council of Ireland describes the growing number of young unemployed as a “canary in the coal mine that can’t be ignored”.
Among some of those on the margins, though, there is clearly a belief the music stopped quite a while ago.
