Monday night’s RTE debate saw 10 party leaders go head-to-head, with plenty of claims by both Government and opposition TDs looking to set out their stall ahead of next week’s general election.
Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin was among those to defend his record in Government, and pointed to his achievements as Irish premier during the pandemic as a reason for voters to back his party again.
At one point, he spoke about how he steered Ireland out of the depths of a crippling recession brought on by the pandemic, claiming that half a million more people are in work since that time.
But were his figures correct?
The claim
Fianna Fail’s Micheal Martin claimed that more than 500,000 additional people are working since he was Taoiseach in the last Government.
During Monday night’s debate on RTE, he said of the Government: “We brought this country back into surplus, coming through the pandemic and [growing] the economy with massive job creation: a half million extra people at work since that time.”
Evaluation
Latest figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that there are only 286,300 more people currently in employment compared to the first quarter of 2020.
In March 2020, before the pandemic hit, there were approximately 2,467,900 employed in Ireland according to the CSO’s Labour Force survey for the first quarter of 2020.
When Mr Martin became Taoiseach in June 2020, there were 1.78 million people employed in Ireland, with the huge drop in employment due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The number of people in employment rose to around 2.5 million at the end of 2021, when Mr Martin ended his term in the Taoiseach’s office and the economy was recovering from the effects of the pandemic.
Mr Martin is technically right that that employment rose by half a million people during his time in the Taoiseach’s office. However, the number when he entered was low because of the impact of Covid-19 on the economy.
The most recent CSO Labour Force Survey for the second quarter of 2024 recorded 2,754,200 people in employment.
Although that is an increase of almost 300,000 people compared to the last quarter before the impact of Covid was felt on the economy, it falls far short of the half a million extra people at work that Mr Martin claimed during the debate.
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