Irish joblessness reaches a high of nearly half a million people.

The Central Statistics Office of Ireland (CSO) has released its latest figures on standardised unemployment in the country for June, showing an 89.6% rise compared to the same time last year.

The Live Register shows that joblessness hit 418,592 in June 2009, compared to 220,811 in June 2008, nearly doubling to its highest rate since April 1996.

The figure is 11.9% (or 21,721) higher than the total of people claiming jobless benefits for May 2009, which stood at 396,871.

The Irish economy officially went into recession in September 2008, after the CSO announced that gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 0.5% in the three months to the end of June, the second successive period of negative growth, following a drop of 0.3% in the first quarter of the year.  

The CSO maintain that these figures should not be taken as a true guage of unemployment, which is measured in the Quarterly National Household Survey, of which the latest measured unemployment at 223,400 for the period January – March 2009.