Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

We have been following the labour market side. As I outlined in my statement, the whole issue of concentration risks is a growing one as far as the overall macro performance is concerned. Obviously we have identified pharma and ICT as being the two sectors that have very strongly contributed. There has been a correction on the ICT side. It is clear that there is a significant adjustment taking place in the global ICT sector, which may be due to the post-pandemic situation. Probably a lot of these firms were too robust and bullish about their prospects mainly because they had done very well during the pandemic so now we are seeing a lot of redundancies and job lay-offs.

We pointed out in our last commentary that last year, between quarter 2 and quarter 3 there was a fall-off in the number of people employed in the ICT sector of somewhere in the region of 10,000 people in the economy. However, the Q4 data, when it was released, showed that nearly all of those jobs had come back on-stream. Clearly, the sector is still quite dynamic in terms of job possibilities and the headline unemployment rate continues to fall even to an historical low. Over the more medium-term, it is clear that the ICT sector will not diminish in importance any time soon. ICT is central to how we operate and function so I do not think there is a systemic long-term decline but there could be more job losses over the short to medium term.