LIKE A SUNNY spell sandwiched between snowstorms, the number crunchers at our Central Statistics Office published their own blizzard of economic data recently.
The headline numbers are nearly too good to be true: at 7.8%, GDP growth last year was comfortably the highest in Europe, and ahead even of India, which has leap-frogged China as the fastest-growing big economy in recent years.
Strong growth helped generate nearly 1,300 new jobs per week during 2017. This meant that by the end of the year the total number of people in work was within touching distance of the two-and-a-quarter million peak hit in late-2007. Cue cries that the lost decade is over. These are neither lies, nor damned lies: just statistics.
*** This article was first published on thejournal.ie on 26 March, 2018 ***
vicduggan 