So, just one in 27 of the Republic's available workforce is unemployed. The figure for Dublin is a mere one in 38. Such ratios are certainly preferable to those of the 1980s, when one in every five or six people was jobless.
Still, while a job's a job, there's work and there's work - labourers, after all, are not lawyers; messengers are not managing directors; cleaners are not consultants. The figures, welcome as they are, do not tell the full story.
Perhaps no other facet of regular human activity (with the possible exception of advertising's exploitation of sex) has been subject to such intense propaganda in recent times as work. It used to be that work was considered and acknowledged as a necessary means to a livelihood and happiness was generally derived from leisure hours. Now work is frequently equated with life itself or, at any rate, is regarded as the aim of life.
Tellingly, however, it is mostly those who tell others what to do who most loudly applaud work's virtues.
You will seldom hear labourers prattling on about "honest toil" or the "nobility of labour". They work to get a week's wages to fund a life or lives, if they have dependants. Guff about the nobility and dignity of work - intended to induce people to work hard as a duty - tends to come from those who tell workers what to do and have a vested interest in workers' productivity. "Executive ability," as the old aphorism suggests, "is deciding quickly and getting someone else to do the work." Quite.
Sure, there can be personal rewards in hard work, not least a sense of self-worth, but there's a price to be paid although you're not supposed to say that. Consider advertising and its depiction of work. Smiling (sometimes even singing and dancing!) sales assistants are shown as being equally enthusiastic about the enterprise as adland's stereotypically wise, avuncular managing director or owner. Notwithstanding that the owner might be making 100 or even 1,000 times as much as the sales assistant, in ads the workers will enthuse about "we" as though they thoroughly identify with the company and have a perfectly equal stake in it.
Mind you, the "we" of the ads very quickly splits into a "them" and "us" when industrial relations problems arise. There's none of your cheesy communal codswallop when the dosh is to be divided. The people on wages are separated from those receiving "remuneration packages" (there's guff, eh?) and the identical interests depicted in the ads can be seen as not just hypocritical but indecent. The sad truth is that work, while it may or may not be unduly exploitative is, despite the risible propaganda, not greatly exciting, enriching and ennobling for most people.
Certainly, lack of work - or, more accurately, lack of money - is generally worse. Laggards, dossers and idlers are nobody's favourites and that's understandable. But the notion that there's economic justice for everybody who works is idiotic. Given that ability, responsibility and experience deserve rewards, it's absurd to argue that everybody ought to earn the same wage. But it's no more absurd than pretending people earning £200 a week should be as enthusiastic and supportive of a business as an owner who could be hauling in £20,000 a week from it.
It was about 20 years ago - in Thatcher's Britain and Reagan's America - that work became so fetishised. All sorts of suspiciously ambitious punters, most of whom were obviously emotionally arrested, began boasting about "working" 18-hour days, seven days a week.
Were it not for the boasting, you could admire their claimed industry and because they presented themselves as resolute, dynamic and even heroic, it was not popular to criticise their excess. But their reversal of "working to live" to "living to work" gave rise to a perverse cult.
As a result of the dysfunction of such obsessives, routinely fΩted by a compliant media, everybody has had to work harder. Vile slogans ("Just Do It"; "If You Snooze, You Lose"; "Greed Is Good") and time-management courses, organised by managers to get workers to add self-management to the institutional variety, have proliferated. But in spite of record levels of employment, individual insecurity continues to thrive. That it does so while security (with its often abysmally paid work) is the world's fastest growing industry, is a striking indictment of the prevailing propaganda about work.
Computer and information technologies were supposed to make work easier and bring greater leisure time. Instead, they have been used to increase productivity. The kind of efficiency which is attributed to computer software is now routinely expected of people. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised given that the programming of people has been at least as assiduously developed as the programming of the "leisure creating" machines.
Indeed, as computer programming requires specialised languages, so too, it seems, does the programming of workers at all levels. Look at job ads nowadays. A random glance at last weekend's ads for big buck (sorry, high-powered) jobs revealed phrases such as "human resource capital management"; "interfacing with operational management" and "recruitment mandates for marketing professionals". (It was unclear in that last one whether "marketing" was an adjective or a verb. Not that it matters greatly, I imagine.) But in the awful, mechanical deadness of such language, you can sense that, really, the employers are seeking machines, not people. Is there not something objectionably objectifying in calling people "human resources"? As for "interfacing" - does it not sound like computer-speak? And the people (sorry again, "human resources") who (which) will pull in these big buck jobs will be expected to apply equally deadening, dehumanising guff to the human resources further down the pecking order.
How about books such as Richard Reeves's Happy Mondays. It claims that people nowadays find work more exciting and more fun than anything else in life. Well, maybe some human resources find this to be the case but not many real people do. As part of the relentless propaganda around the cult of work, Reeves's polemic is typical. It may even be a clever piece of sophistry because managers managing human resource capital are likely to buy the thing in bulk for employees.
Whatever it is, it's all rather sad. Most people, whether they enjoy their work or not, at least value it and the incessant message about how wonderful work should be is not only patronising but squalid. Given the technology of the world, there's no need for work to devour so many lives. But it does and it will continue to do so until society agrees enough is enough.
A large part of the price is already paid by family life. Remember American Beauty, where human intimacy died to accommodate work and the acquisition of consumer goods? In this country we don't have American Beauty-style commuter suburbs. That's because you need roads and public transport in order to commute. But we must be getting the family dysfunctions and loss of intimacy which inevitably follow excessive stress in work. "Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do," said Oscar Wilde. If Oscar got it right - and he has a fair record - the rampant Americanisation of work in the Republic will end in more and more tears. Not that many will care. After all, human intimacy gets in the way of computer-like efficiency.
Bertrand Russell said: "one of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important". If so, the job ads must be a boon for psychiatrists. The awful language, designed to aggrandise, cannot but make applicants believe such work is of vital importance. Certainly, work is where status and power have always resided for all except the parasitic rich. But the emphasis on its importance has intensified to an unhealthy degree in recent times.
No doubt, if you are interfacing with operational management you are more important than if you were merely meeting working managers. And yet, you've got to hope that most people can see the nonsense for what it is: a contrivance to make a job, sound intimidatingly grandiose. It is a distortion of proportion, intended to bolster hierarchies, which in most cases have little or no moral authority beyond the dubious authority of the market.
The anecdote about Denis O'Brien's amazement that a university classmate could read a book "not on the course" is a metaphor for what counts in the market. If it's not immediately relevant, it's superfluous . . . pointless really. The kind of dilettantism or even idleness required for contemplation does not fit with the prevailing cult of work. What's required are cogs for the machine, each one engineered for efficiency.
The great philosopher, Morrissey, of The Smiths, probably overstated the drawbacks when he observed that "work is a four letter word". Work, after all, can bring rewards beyond wages or even remuneration packages. But the propaganda built around it has become tyrannical, encouraging bullying and producing frayed nerves among too many workers. You really would have to wonder if this society's changed attitude to work works. Problem is, there's little sigh of its burnout yet. That seems to be reserved for replaceable human resources.