Official figures show that the number of people signing on the Live Register fell again in October, the first time since 2007 that the figure has dropped for two months in a row.
The Central Statistics Office said the seasonally adjusted figure dropped by 6,600 from September to stand at 443,000. Men accounted for 5,100 of this fall.
This figure strips out seasonal changes, such as the return of students to college. The headline figure fell by 12,864 to 429,553. The CSO said the unemployment rate fell back to 13.6% from 13.7% in September.
The Live Register includes some part-time, seasonal and casual workers. It is not designed to measure unemployment, though it is regarded as the most up-to-date indicator of the state of the jobs market.
The CSO also said that there were 49,827 new claimants on the Live Register in October, up from almost 40,000 in September. This figure is not the same as the monthly change in the Live Register, which is affected by people closing claims and moving between different schemes.
The number of people signing on for more than a year fell marginally in October, though long-term claimants still make up a third of the total number of people on the Live Register.
Lay-offs fell by 40% in October
Separate figures show a sharp fall in the number of redundancies notified to the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment last month.
The department said it was told of 3,910 lay-offs in October, down more than 40% from the figure from the same month last year. This is the biggest annual drop so far this year.
For the first ten months of the year, redundancies are down 23% at 51,385, though this is still well above the figures for 2008, when there were 40,600 lay-offs in the whole year.
Enterprise Minister Batt O'Keeffe said the figures were 'very encouraging'.
