Mr Seán Hogan, an employee of 33 years standing with the Miza Ireland pharmaceutical plant in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, doesn't need a raft of reports and statistics to tell him unemployment is rising again.
Live register figures recording an increase to 4.4 per cent in November; a FÁS review in the same month that suggests the problem is getting worse; an ongoing rise in notified redundancies to the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment ... the evidence is all around.
Mr Hogan and his wife Mary were two of the casualties in the most recent company collapse to make the headlines, the closure of Miza with the loss of 280 jobs. "I've been down the town today and yesterday and everybody is sympathising with me. It is the same as if somebody died," he says. Miza, formerly Antigen, was Roscrea's biggest employer and its loss has a far greater impact than 280 jobs might suggest, Mr Hogan points out.
When he went to sign on for social welfare, he met the women who worked in the firm contracted to clean the Miza factory. Mr Hogan, who worked as a factory operative, joined the then Antigen plant in 1970 at the age of 14. Finding himself suddenly unemployed has come as a shock, but he has "no intention of hanging around, thinking life owes me a living". In common with thousands of others who have joined the dole queues since April last year - when the live register unemployment rate reached a low of 3.7 per cent - he is actively seeking work.
And while unemployment may not be the problem it was in the 1980s and early 1990s, the numbers out of work are steadily increasing again.
As Mr Eric Conroy, general secretary of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed, points out, 25,000 more people - a total of 158,600 - are signing on than was the case early last year. While many of those who lost their jobs last year worked in the IT sector, this year traditional manufacturing companies have taken the biggest hit, he says.
Even if one takes the lower Quarterly National Household Survey figures preferred by most economists, the upward trend is the same. According to the latest household survey figures available, the number of people out of work from June to August was 86,700, an increase of 9,500 on the previous quarter.
A review of unemployment trends undertaken by FÁS last month provided few grounds for optimism about a turnaround.
Its author, Mr Brian McCormick, said not only was unemployment set to rise in the immediate future, it would also become more deep-rooted in the absence of corrective measures.
"There is a real danger that cyclical unemployment will turn into structural unemployment if appropriate interventions are not in place to re-skill those who become unemployed during the downturn," he concluded.
He also pointed to another worrying feature: were it not for the rapid expansion in public-sector staff numbers, which rose by 50,000 over the past five years, the underlying problem would be more obvious.
That source of job creation has now dried up, however, given Finance Minister McCreevy's decision, announced in the Budget, to cap public service employee numbers at their present level, and cut them by 5,000 over the next three years.
Hidden within the overall figures, some of the detail is also a matter of serious concern. Mr Conroy points out that the number of long-term unemployed, currently 21,800 or 1.2 per cent of the labour force, is creeping up again.
"The Government set a target this year of eliminating long-term unemployment by 2007, but we're already going in the wrong direction," he says.
At a time when it should be getting to grips with the problem, he is highly critical of the Government for introducing cutbacks in a range of job-creation areas.
These include the significant reductions, announced last month in the Government's spending estimates, in funding for the IDA, Enterprise Ireland, Shannon Development and the county enterprise boards.
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