Real Irish unemployment rate

There is something wrong with the way the unemployment figures are being calculated. For instance Bertie Aherns biography (and almost all official figures) says he got the unemployment rate from 18.1 percent to less than 3.1 percent. It is widely reported the current rate of unemployment is at 14 percent. These statements bring up a number of issues for me.

The highest I remember unemployment to be was about 220 thousand people. If that is presented officially as 18 percent, then how can today's current figures of 450 thousand be presented as 14 percent.

The figures imply a huge increase in the population, but that figure would need to almost double the population to get 450 thousand people unemployed to represent 14 percent of the population.

We know the population did not double, and we also know there has been a huge number of people emigrating in the past few years, so somehow these figures do not add up.

There is something wrong.

I,m not debating the differences between long term unemployment, short term unemployment, people working short time, permanent part time workers etc etc, it's the actual factual percentage of unemployed people that I am interested in.

While I,m at it I may as well throw out another few issues that bugs me in relation to unemployment.

The CSO figures are calculated on a workforce of people aged between 15 years and 66 years. They do not distinguish between those that are actually still in school, or those that have taken early retirement (which in reality will never work again, and I,m not talking about civil or public servants that take the governments generous offer of an early pension and lump sum payments to retire, and who in reality will be brought back either as employees of quangos, or what is normal, that they are employed as self employed consultants).

I,m talking about people that have been laid off or made redundant and who in reality will never get jobs again, in any area of work. If those people are excluded from the workforce then the real unemployment rate will increase dramatically from the official 14 percent to more than thirty percent (using my anecdotal figures).

So there you go, explain that one.