Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The story of young people in this country and their abuse by this Government, and the last one for that matter, is the flip side of the coin of the mirage the Government has tried to conjure up about the so-called exit from the so-called bailout. We are not exiting anything and we were never bailed out in the first place. The human reality of that is vicious, vindictive attacks on the least well off in our society, the old, the sick and, of course, the young, as this motion highlights. It is sickening that this Government compounds the insult to young people. It is unable to provide meaningful, well-paid employment for energetic, educated young people who desperately want to work and contribute to our society. All this Government can do is kick them when they are down by cutting their social welfare in order to try to dragoon them into scam jobs in which they can be exploited by unscrupulous employers - or, with the Government's new Gateway project, by local authorities. The aim is to create a pool of cheap labour that can be exploited. Thus, the people who are the victims of this crisis become double victims, denied meaningful employment and then brutally exploited because of the conditions that the Government, the financial elites, the bankers and bondholders have created for them. What puts the lie to the Government's claim that these measures are to activate young people, who apparently have no desire, according to the Government, to find meaningful work, is the fact that hundreds of thousands of young people are streaming out of the country. If they need to be activated, how come they are showing the energy to leave the country? Is it because they want to laze about and do nothing?

No, it is because they want work elsewhere that the Government is unable to provide for them here. It sees young people as another group on which to unload the cost of the recession and it is using the atmosphere of recession to exploit young workers and to ratchet down pay and conditions for them. It is an absolute disgrace and I hope that simmering agitation among young people through the We're Not Leaving campaign and the youth assembly will make the Government rue the day it picked on Ireland's young people.

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