Unemployment in Northern Ireland lurched in the wrong direction with an increase of 5,000 in the last quarter, according to figures released today.
There will be more bad news to come when a raft of redundancies announced recently work their way into the figures.
Seasonally-adjusted figures released by the British government for the period June to August showed there were 47,000 people - 6.1 per cent of the workforce - unemployed.
The 5,000 increase represented a 0.7 per cent rise from the last quarter and a 0.1 per cent increase over the year, according to the preferred International Labour Organisation definition of unemployment.
Despite the increase, the numbers of people claiming Jobseekers Allowance remained unchanged from last month at 35,400 - 4.5 per cent of the workforce.
However it represented a decrease of 3,300 over the year. The latest statistics do not include about 1,000 redundancies announced in the past couple of weeks, including the slashing of the workforce at troubled Harland and Wolf shipyard in Belfast, reductions at the neighbouring Shorts aerospace company and three high-tech companies in Co Antrim.
The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Belfast said it may be some time before they were reflected in the unemployment figures.
Meanwhile manufacturing figures released today showed an increase in output in Northern Ireland of 3.6 per cent in the second quarter of the year compared with the previous quarter.
PA