Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The CSO's most recent monthly unemployment figures released this week show that youth unemployment had fallen to 15.9% in September. This is a significant decrease of five percentage points, from 20.9%, in the past 12 months. Therefore, in just the past year youth unemployment has fallen from over 20% to 15.9%. The overall unemployment rate fell by 1.2 percentage points in the same period, from 9.1% to 7.9%.

Reduced rates for younger jobseeker’s allowance recipients were first introduced in 2009 under the Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government and were further extended to apply to jobseekers under 26 years of age by the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government in subsequent budgets. These measures were introduced as they were considered to prevent young people from entering welfare dependency by providing young jobseekers with a strong financial incentive to engage in education or training or to take up employment. Should a young jobseeker on a reduced jobseeker’s allowance payment participate in an education or training programme, he or she will receive a higher weekly payment of €160.

The review of jobseeker’s allowance rates for young persons under 26 years of age will examine the effectiveness of the reduced rates in encouraging young jobseekers to avail of education, training, employment programmes and opportunities. As part of a wider effort to encourage and promote research based on the Department’s administrative data, researchers from the National University of Ireland Maynooth have been provided with data on all jobseeker's allowance claims since 2007 for persons aged under 28 years. They intend looking specifically at the impact of changes in rates on the duration of young people’s claims and on their subsequent employment experience after exiting from unemployment. It is hoped that their analysis will have preliminary results before the end of the year.

The Department of Social Protection continues to identify effective measures to support young people in finding and securing sustainable jobs through engagement processes and by incentivising them to avail of educational and training opportunities, thereby enhancing their employment prospects.

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