For many Irish people, 1990 is remembered as the year of the World Cup quarter finals. Cruelly, Ireland exited the Italia ‘90 competition following a jammy goal from Italian striker Totó Schillaci, but it was such an incredible run: the laughs, the stories, the goals, the penalties and the heroic last game against host nation Italy in their Eternal City.
This week, ahead of the 2026 World Cup qualifying match against Czech Republic on Thursday, the country will be gripped by nostalgia for 1990 (the year we first qualified for the tournament) - those mullets, those shell suits, that breakdancing, the Ford Cortinas, bottles of Satzenbrau and, of course, Charlie Haughey’s imperial post-match lap of honour in Rome, saluting his travelling fans. What an operator!
That year was yet another time of queues outside the US embassy, eventually leading to the Morrison programme. It was an era of mass emigration and double-digit unemployment, in a country where stable jobs were as rare as hen’s teeth. The 1980s had been a jobless decade in Ireland, while employment was plentiful abroad. The boom in our three biggest trading partners, Britain, West Germany and the United States, had up to then passed us by. There was little reason to believe that endemic unemployment would not continue to be the Irish disease. Then, out of the blue, something happened. The Irish economy began to create jobs – and it hasn’t stopped since.
In 1990, total employment in the economy was 1.1 million, slightly up on the 1 million employed in 1950. For four decades, Irish employment levels barely budged while emigration persisted, but between 1990 and 2005, employment expanded to 1.9 million, an increase of 800,000 jobs, or about 72 per cent. GDP expanded at an average of 9.4 per cent annually between 1995 and 2000 – faster than the German and French post-war miracles.
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Following a rise in joblessness after the crash, which many feared would be permanent, the economy has added more and more jobs every year. From 2014 to 2025, employment growth has risen by an average of 3.5 per cent per year. Today, 2.83 million people are employed in the Republic of Ireland, and the labour force – the amount of people available for work – is 2.96 million, which is the highest on record.
Consider those figures again. In the 40 years up to 1990, employment hardly grew at all. In the 35 years since Packie Bonner’s penalty save, the Irish economy has created 1.8 million extra jobs. Soon there will be three times more people working here as there were in the early 1990s. No other country in the world has added so many jobs to their economy and society. Long-term unemployment remains low at 1.2 per cent. Meanwhile, based on LinkedIn data, job applications to Irish roles are rising (+2.2 per cent year on year) even as our European peers contract. In Germany, job applications have fallen by 3.7 per cent, by 5.7 per cent in France and, worryingly for our closest neighbours, by 7.9 per cent in the UK.
The strength of the Irish labour market is evidenced by the fact that it is drawing in immigrants, with about 13 per cent of searches for Irish jobs on job-hunt site Indeed originating from outside Ireland. .
Reports that AI is displacing early-career professionals and graduates may be overstated. While Indeed has seen graduate vacancies fall, a survey by the Higher Education Authority paints a more encouraging picture. In 2024, 80.2 per cent of Irish graduates were employed within nine months of graduating, compared with 80 per cent in 2023 and 83 per cent in 2022. Graduate employment has fallen in two years, but not dramatically.
This general employment buoyancy is bolstered by the fact that wage growth is running at approximately 4.1 per cent year-on-year.
How did this employment miracle happen?
Understanding the positive impact of US companies on St Patrick’s Day, Micheál Martin skilfully negotiated a difficult tightrope walk in the Oval Office, distracting the Emperor with the story about 23 former US presidents being of Irish descent. Credit is due to the State agencies. Ireland’s State enterprise agencies are directly responsible for record-high employment of 585,000 people in client companies, about 20 per cent of the total workforce. IDA Ireland supports 312,400 jobs in foreign-owned firms, while Enterprise Ireland supports 232,425 in Irish-owned companies.
Last year, the IDA approved 323 new investments, which are expected to create 15,000 additional jobs. Since 2021, the IDA supported 973 investments, which led to 76,790 job creations over the four-year period to 2024. US multinationals remain the primary driver of high-value job creation. About 60 per cent of US firms already based in Ireland plan to expand their Irish workforce. Ireland hosts 10 of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies and is Europe’s largest tech hub by employment share.
While lots of attention is focused on the multinationals, the real employment story miracle in Ireland is local Irish businesses, which account for 74.9 per cent of total private employment. No business ever opens with the primary intention of employing people; businesses open to sell a popular product for a profit. Employees are – initially at least – a cost, like rent. The decision to employ people comes only after a product has been sold commercially. Any employer who takes on more workers than the revenue of the business can sustain will go bust. In addition, profit margin, the medium-term acid test of business success, can only be sustained if costs are consistently less than revenue, meaning the key to permanent employment is demand in the economy and a successful product.
When you hear a politician talking about “job creation”, you know they have never employed anyone, ever. Job creation comes as the result of something being sold first. Jobs are not created, they are derived. They are derived from ongoing sales. Obviously, there are start-ups which employ people first in the hope that the product they are about to launch will fly, but they are the exception.
In most normal circumstances, additional employment derives from additional revenue. Therefore, the key person in all this is the person who sees opportunity and risks their own money and time to turn the potential into reality. These are the people who we call entrepreneurs, and they are the ones who make the economy dance. Without them, there are no products or sales, and there is no demand for workers.
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The big story in Ireland over the past three decades is the emergence of an Irish entrepreneurial class that has taken risks to open small businesses, when it might be easier to take a secure job and let someone else wake up at night worrying about paying the rates, the wages and keeping a myriad of other people such as suppliers, retailers, landlords and of course customers, happy.
These are the real heroes of the Irish economy. Many are not rich. They do it because it is in their DNA. They are disrupters, people who do not want a wage, an insurance policy or a boss. They want to create something new and better than the next person. Creatures of commerce, they think differently to the political class or the Brahmin caste of high professionals. These are the people who make the economy fire on all cylinders. Without them, Ireland would go back to the 1980s, mired in low growth, high unemployment, encumbered with debts we can’t pay. With them, a million more jobs will be created.
If we are going into a global downturn driven by events in the Gulf, the Government needs to know that the only people who will enable us to ride the storm are those who take commercial risks.
They need to be encouraged – not vilified.
