The Workers’ Party has dismissed the latest government unemployment figures as coming from “the land of Hocus Pocus” and having little relationship to reality.
Workers’ Party spokesman Seamus McDonagh said the figures produced by the Central Statistics Office were based on the most restrictive definition of unemployment possible and did not account for tens of thousands of people who did not have jobs but were disappeared into a whole range of schemes and non-inclusion clauses.
Mr. McDonagh said that the Quarterly Household Survey was a “glorified opinion poll” based on a sample when the actual figures were available and showed the exact situation. Large numbers of people had their workless status ignored because they were forced into schemes such as JobBridge and Tús, onto dead-end courses and the new Pathways to Work mechanism.
The Meath WP representative also referred to a report issued last week by the National Youth Council of Ireland which suggested as many as 300,000 people, many of them under 25s, had emigrated over the past four years. “With mass emigration still continuing and thousands conveniently erased from the jobless figures, it is obvious that these unemployment statistics do not stack up” said Seamus McDonagh.
“These figures came from the same school of illusion as the government’s registration figures for Irish Water. They also come from the same deluded mindset portrayed by Joan Burton on radio today when she predicted support for her party would magically recover if only people would believe her story. They do not believe it and they will not believe it whenever the election comes because there has been no recovery for working class people and they do not believe in hocus pocus statistics or hocus pocus economics”, said the Workers’ Party representative.