The Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed has called on the Government to be more ambitious in relation to job creation.
Latest unemployment figures show that more than 40% of the 437,000 people on the Live Register have been seeking work for more than a year.
Bríd O'Brien of the INOU said the Government needs to do more to ensure that the Live Register is seen as a human resource pool, where employers look to fill vacancies.
"They have set themselves two targets that at one level are ambitious, where the economy currently is, and at another level aren't half ambitious enough,” Ms O'Brien said.
“One is to reduce the long-term unemployed by 75,000, but that's by 2015; that needs to happen far sooner than that.
“The other is to have an additional 100,000 people in employment by 2016. Now without significant re-education training programmes on a far greater scale than we've seen, that's not going to happen."
Ms O'Brien said that while many of the job losses occurred in the area of construction at the start of the downturn - mainly affecting men - job losses are now occurring across other sectors.
"We're now seeing a number of job losses that are equally (affecting) men and women and also in sectors where the employment profile is more female," Ms O'Brien said.
"We are seeing it right across the economy as austerity bites and people have less income in their pockets and less disposable income.
"It is affecting areas like retail and a whole range of sectors that relied on people having that additional money."
