Official figures show that the number of people signing on climbed in May, having fallen back slightly in April.
The Central Statistics Office said the seasonally adjusted Live Register figure rose by 6,600 from April to reach 439,100, a record high. This brought the jobless rate up to 13.7% from 13.4% in April.
The Live Register figures had shown little change in the early months of the year, leading to suggestions that the rise in unemployment could be stabilising. The May rise, which was the biggest monthly rise since August last year, surprised most economists.
The headline figure, which does not take seasonal factors into account, was up by 5,265 to 437,922. The number of people on the dole in May was just over 11% higher than a year earlier.
A spokesman for Enterprise, Trade & Innovation Minister Batt O'Keeffe described the May rise as 'relatively modest' after two months of stabilisation. The spokesman also referred to a fall in the number of lay-offs notified to the Department, saying the labour market was beginning to reflect greater economic stability.
But Fine Gael enterprise spokesman Leo Varadkar said the Government's lack of a jobs and stimulus package 'has never looked more damaging', claiming what he called 'government spin' had been blown away.
Labour enterprise spokesman Willie Penrose said the figure 'gives the lie to Government claims that we have turned the corner'.
Lay-off figure lower in May
Separate figures from the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Innovation show a fall in redundancies in May.
The department said 5,032 lay-offs were notified to it during the month, down 36.7% from the same month last year. The May figure was the lowest so far this year.
For the first five months of 2010, department figures show that 28,587 people have been made redundant, a drop of almost 20% from the same period last year.
There were more than 77,000 redundancies last year, more than treble the number recorded in 2007.
