Live register at lowest level since 2008

FIGURES for August released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) have shown the number of people on the Live Register across north and mid- Cork was at its lowest level in almost a decade.

The CSO figures revealed the total number of people ‘signing on’ at the Mallow, Fermoy, Newmarket and Macroom social welfare offices during August stood at 4,653 – the lowest figure for the month since 2008.

In August of that year the combined total for the four offices stood at 4,564. However, within 12-months that figure had almost doubled to 8,842, reflecting the seismic changes that the wider Irish economy underwent following the collapse of the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’.

Those reverberations continued to be felt across the region into 2010, with the combined total for the four offices in August of that year standing at a high of 10,008.

Within 12-months the first feeble shoots of a recovery began to be felt, with the number of people on the register at the end of August 2011 dropping slightly to 9,430.

Since then the figure has continued to drop with each passing year, with the combined number of people signing on the Live Register in the four offices last month - dropping below the 5,000 mark for the first time since 2008.

As of August 31 the total Live Register figure for Mallow stood at 1,495, Fermoy 1,404, Newmarket 834 and Macroom 920.

This represents an overall reduction across the four offices of 53.5% from the peak figure in 2010.

The decrease mirrored the tend across Cork, with the number of people on the Live Register across the county at the end of last month standing at 24,124 – a reduction of 49.3% on the figure for May 2010 of 47,681.