Michael McNamara (Clare, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Unlike Deputy Maloney, I will not go back far in history. I will not go back beyond the last election, save to say that I am proud to be a member of a party that engages with the duty of government once in a while, rather than throwing stones from the Opposition side. Our party engages with ideas and seeks to move them forward just as, I am happy to acknowledge, Sinn Féin is doing in Northern Ireland at the moment. After a long period of not engaging in government it is now in government there. Sometimes decisions are difficult in government, as those in Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland would accept.

One of the darkest moments of the last election for me was meeting a man in a housing estate between Ennis and Clarecastle. He was packing up a car to drive to England to begin to try to find work there. He was a tradesman. He was not a happy man, he was desolate about leaving a mortgage, a wife and children behind.

He pointed to a common area in the estate in which he lived and said that he could not even mow that grass. There are community employment schemes in the area but they do not employ him or many others.

I am proud that this Government has increased the number of community employment schemes. I take pride in this initiative which has been criticised so much on the Opposition benches. I am not saying that painting walls, mowing grass or fixing roads are jobs that anybody should be forced into. The dignity of such work, however, should not be belittled in this House because many people undertake such jobs. If they did not do so, our communities simply could not exist.

Councils can and do pay for work but there is much work that needs to be done in our communities that councils are not paying for and have never paid for. Even in the boom times of illusionary surpluses and full employment, those works were not done. It is important to bear in mind that this Gateway scheme has been agreed with the trade union movement to ensure there is no job displacement. Gateway is facilitating works in our cities and rural areas, including smaller towns and villages across the country, that otherwise would not get done. Such works improve the living standards of all in society.

Like the Labour Party, Sinn Féin talks a lot about rights on both sides of the Border. I agree to some extent with them that it was the lack of respect for rights, though not only that, which contributed in large measure to the instability in Northern Ireland. In considering rights in any republic, we must also look at duties. We all have a duty to pay our taxes. There is a lot of talk at the moment about philanthropists. It is all well and good to be a philanthropist and give money once in a while over and above that which one has a duty to give. However, every citizen in this State has a duty to pay his or her taxes. In addition, every company resident in this State - I do not believe in so-called non-resident companies - as part of the social contract has to pay its taxes. That is the way in which people fortunate enough to have employment can fulfil their duty to the common good in our Republic.

What most annoyed the man to whom I spoke in Ennis was that he could not even contribute to society. Not alone could he not get a job, there was no mechanism by which he could contribute. There was no way he could go out every morning and do something useful to make his community a little bit better. To the extent that the Gateway scheme achieves that, I am quite proud that the Government has introduced it and I make no apologies to anybody for that. Of course, I would be against slave labour or any of the draconian measures the Opposition would like to portray this scheme as, but that is simply not what it is.

The Sinn Féin Private Members' motion points out that "when the Government came to power 55.1 per cent of those unemployed were long-term unemployed, after three years of this Government 61.4 per cent of those unemployed are now long-term unemployed". I do not dispute the veracity of that fact, but that is all the more reason to give people who are long-term unemployed something to do if they so wish. We should give them a mechanism by which they can contribute to their areas and society generally. Some people on these benches may not want to avail of that mechanism but some of the people I met while canvassing for the last general election did want to avail of such a scheme. They were quite annoyed by the fact that there was no such mechanism, but there is now.

As regards the figure for the long-term unemployed, if we can learn anything from the 1980s it is how detrimental is long-term unemployment. There is an absolute necessity to introduce labour-activation measures to give people hope and a mechanism by which they can contribute to society if they cannot get a job at the moment.

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