An \u201cunusual\u201d but not surprising drop in Ireland’s GDP was recorded in the first quarter of the year, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has said.<\/p>\n
There was a 12.1 per cent fall in gross domestic product with a 0.6 per cent rise in modified domestic demand \u2013 a better measure of the domestic economy \u2013 from January to March.<\/p>\n
Multinational-dominated sectors contracted by 27.1 per cent in the first three months of the year as domestic sectors expanded by 0.4 per cent.<\/p>\n
Chris Sibley, assistant director general with responsibility for national accounts and price statistics, said the \u201cbig fall\u201d in GDP was to be expected.<\/p>\n
Figures from the CSO indicated that the country’s economy grew dramatically this time last year as tech and pharmaceutical exports to the US increased ahead of tariffs threatened by US President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
Ireland\u2019s GDP surged by 9.4 per cent in Q1 last year, according to the CSO, and is now \u201cunwinding\u201d after those increases.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat big fall in GDP is that unwinding of that activity we saw at the end of 2024 and mostly in 2025,\u201d he said at a briefing on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not as surprising as you might expect, because when we saw a year ago, we were sitting here in the same room, looking at the same increase in the data, and I guess you walked out of the room a year ago thinking it\u2019s probably going to fall again the next quarter, and it\u2019s taken a couple of quarters to unwind.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it is an unusual number this quarter, but in the context of the last 12 months, it\u2019s not unexpected.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fall in GDP was largely driven by the pharma sector and a more modest drop in the tech sector, he said.<\/p>\n
He added that when foreign-based companies are stripped from the figures, there were \u201csmall positives\u201d in the domestic economy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can see quarter-on-quarter of positive growth. There\u2019s quite a positive story there, even when we compare the data internationally,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe big domestic sector is distribution, transport, hotels, restaurants, watching the recovery in construction and what\u2019s going on there, professional services increasing and the public sector data.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said there was \u201cbroad-based\u201d domestic growth, with quarter-on-quarter consumption growth indicating \u201cconfidence around the economy\u201d.<\/p>\n
Compared with other European countries, Ireland\u2019s consumption is \u201cin the middle of the pack\u201d, Sibley said, despite inflation now at 3.7 per cent, according to the latest Consumer Price Index data.<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite the large price increases you see in the economy, we\u2019re still seeing large increases in consumption by all of us on goods and services again this quarter. It\u2019s evenly split between goods at 0.5 per cent and services at 0.6 per cent.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said another significant change in the data was that people\u2019s wages had also fallen by 3 per cent in Q1 due to a reduction in the number of hours worked.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have really good, almost real-time data on this, and this is falling a little \u2013 3 per cent. The main factor driving down the wage bill, which looks different from a lot of the other domestic data, it\u2019s hours worked have fallen.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll see from our Labour Force Survey publication that hours worked has fallen across a number of sectors, and that\u2019s what\u2019s driving down the what we call the compensation of employees (COE), or wages.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the only one that\u2019s bucking the trend in the run of domestic indicators.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cThe unusual COE result today is something to watch, but over a longer period of time, that\u2019s a strong positive too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Assistant director general Gillian Roche said goods exports in Q1 were worth \u20ac77 billion and imported goods worth \u20ac46 billion, while exported services were worth \u20ac127 billion and imported services \u20ac117 billion.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of March, the net international investment positions \u2013 the balance between our financial assets and liabilities with the rest of the world \u2013 stood at a net liability position of \u20ac340 billion and the stock of foreign direct investment in Ireland stood at \u20ac1.1 trillion,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An \u201cunusual\u201d but not surprising drop in Ireland’s GDP was recorded in the first quarter of the year,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,113,61,60],"class_list":["post-482772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}