Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It does not reveal that many people are leaving the workforce. As Dan O'Brien noted in an article in The Irish Times last Monday, one measures the participation rate, which is the true measure of unemployment. Moreover, it does not take into account the fact that people are hiding out in the education system and in all the training schemes and nor does it take into account that, if my arithmetic is correct, 200 people per day are emigrating from this country. They are not doing so from a desire to view the Seven Wonders of the World, as the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, once suggested, but simply because they have no job and they wish to get one. Moreover, many of them are taking with them skills expensively acquired at the expense of the Irish taxpayer, that is, those very skills needed to get the country going again.

If one measures this in another way, the Government published a stability programme update in April 2011, which is fair enough. It projected that the numbers at work would grow by 102,000 over the period from 2011 to 2015. However, if one fast-forwards to April 2012, when the famous jobs initiative was published, that figure of 102,000 had fallen to 67,000. Moreover, if one fast-forwards a further six months to last month when the Government published its medium-term fiscal statement, the number by which employment will grow in the period from 2011 to 2015 had now fallen to 18,000. In its projections last year, the Government expected employment to grow for the past 12 months but instead, it has fallen by 24,000. Consequently, the net result of all these bamboozling figures is that at present, 1.81 million people are at work and the Government expects that figure to be 1.828 million, or 18,000 more, by 2015. What does this make of the Taoiseach's promise that he will take 100,000 long-term unemployed people from the live register during the lifetime of the present Government? There is as much chance of this happening as the man had of finding El Dorado or the people had of finding the Holy Grail, when they all became lost, suffered from disease and illness or were destroyed. That objective has disappeared and the Government's own policies have helped to create this situation.

I refer to lack of investment, regressive taxation and cuts in capital expenditure etc., as well as an excessive and almost exclusive concentration on the supply side of the economy when a large part of the problem is on the demand side. How much time have I left?

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