There is broad recognition of the crucial role of employment in preventing poverty
and in enabling poor households to move out of poverty (ILO, 2005; Caputo, 1991;
OECD 1998, 2004). In this report we examine in detail the relationship between work
and poverty in Ireland from 2004 to 2010 – a period of rapid economic change,
spanning both strong growth and recession. Ireland is an interesting case because of
the depth of the recession and because, even during the boom years of the early
2000s, the rate of joblessness at household level was very high by European
standards. Throughout the report we focus on adults of working age (taken as age
18 to 59, following Eurostat conventions) and the children who depend on them.
We consider two key indicators related to work and poverty. The first is household
joblessness, measured using the EU ‘very low work intensity’ (VLWI) indicator. A
household is considered in VLWI when the working-age adults were in employment
for less than one fifth of the available person-months (with an adjustment for parttime
work) over the previous year. The rate of VLWI in Ireland, as noted above, was
very high by European standards at the end of the 2000s.