“Only a few of my friends have jobs,” says 19-year-old David Moran, from the Oliver Bond estate in Dublin’s south inner city. He mentions one who is working as a barber then pauses briefly and laughs a little as he realises he can’t think of a second.

“To be honest, I think only one of my friends has a job,” he says.

Moran liked school, he says, and did well in his Leaving Certificate last year but his school’s career guidance counsellors pointed him in the direction of a carpentry apprenticeship on the basis of their engagement with him. When he realised that it just wasn’t for him, he too did a course to become a barber.

“I like the work and have applied for a lot of jobs,” he says. “I’ve had about six trials but then haven’t heard back from any of them.” The father of his friend who has the job, he says, owns the barber’s shop.

Speaking on Tuesday at the launch by the National Youth Council of Ireland of a report it commissioned by Tasc into youth unemployment and the challenges facing young people who want to get homes of their own, Moran quietly acknowledges he is familiar with the issue.

“I have to share a room with my sister, who is 13, and it would be good to have a bit of privacy,” he says.

The report suggests that while youth (classified as applying to people between 15 and 24) unemployment has fallen substantially since the financial crash, standing at just over 13 per cent now compared 32 per cent at one point, there are 120,000 fewer young people in employment than was the case at the height of the boom. Those in their teens, like Moran, are still disproportionately hit by the failure of the jobs market to fully bounce back, with an unemployment rate of more than 20 per cent.

He would, he says, love to have the opportunity to work as a barber, or youth worker, and would be happy to return to education or training but, like so many in his position, there is a pressure too to bring in an income.

Asked if he is hopeful about the future, he says: “Well, I’m not going to just walk straight into a place and be told there’s a job for you.”

Noel Fitzgerald, one of the youth workers at the Solas-run centre in the Liberties that Moran attends, says getting more young people to stick with education is key to changing the employment landscape in the city’s most economically deprived areas but the supports need to be there to counter the more immediate pressure on many to contribute to household incomes.

Rising youth unemployment in Ireland: ‘You apply for 100 jobs and 95 don’t get back to you’

“Because of where they come from, they’re rushed into employment, which might be a retail job or something that they’re really not suited to or interested in. A lot of those jobs that they take up don’t reflect how smart they are or how much they can progress in life. It’s more ‘because we come from Oliver Bond, because we come from St Teresa’s Gardens, because we come from York Street flats, this is the level of employment we’re meant to take up’.

“As youth workers, though, we see on a daily basis that young people’s potential in these areas is massive. It’s just that structurally, historically, they’ve never been given a pathway.”

The alternatives are all too easy to pursue, with criminal gangs often offering easy money, and a key part of the job is maintaining the morale of young people who can become demoralised at being repeatedly rejected by employers.

The pursuit of further education, meanwhile, can seem impossible, says Fitzgerald’s colleague, Adam Mack. “People say there are grants available but the Susi grant is just not enough to put a young person in a position to tell their Ma and Da they are going to go back and study for the next three or four years.”