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The amount of people out of work for more than a year and classed as long-term unemployed now makes up almost two-thirds of those officially jobless, a report has found.
A study by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has put the overall unemployment rate unchanged at 14.8% with 308,500 people out of work.
Highlighting the extent of the damage the economic collapse has done to job prospects in some sectors, it also showed that the long-term unemployment rate is 8.8%, an increase of more than 1%.
People seeking work for more than 12 months straight between April and June this year make up almost 60% of unemployment.
This compares with almost 54% a year earlier and 43% in the second quarter of 2010.
Some 184,800 people are now classed as being long-term unemployed, the CSO said.
The report said the final three months of 2010 was the first occasion since the late 1990s when long-term unemployment accounted for more than half of total unemployment. Since then the figure has stabilised at close to 60% in the last three quarters.
Further breakdown of the jobless figures showed that the unemployment rate for men was 17.8% and the unemployment rate for women was 10.9%.
The CSO said the total number of people in the labour force in the second quarter of this year was 2,096,400 - a fall of 29,500, or 1.4%, over the year.
Over the year to the end of June, the agency's Quarterly National Household Survey found that the number of people in work fell by 33,400 to 1,787,900.
