Irish Unemployment Drops to Near Nine-Year Low as Economy Surges

Ireland’s unemployment rate fell to the lowest level in nearly nine years in February, another step on the road to recovery from the nation’s worst economic crisis on record.

Unemployment dropped to 6.6 percent this month, the Central Statistics Office said in Dublin on Tuesday. That fell from a revised 6.7 percent rate a month earlier, and is the lowest since July 2008. The jobless rate peaked at 15.2 percent in January 2012.