John Lyons (Dublin North West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Thank you, Chairman. I welcome the delegates and thank them for their presentations. My first question is to Mr. Strauss. I attended the conference on employment organised by the European Commission. In fact, I was sitting across from Mr. Strauss when Professor Bill Mitchell, director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity and professor of economics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, spoke about the concept of a job guarantee. He pointed out that the model of modern society created unemployment because there were many jobs which, although beneficial to communities, offered no financial dividend to potential employers. Some of Mr. Mitchell's ideas have been adopted in the creation of a job guarantee scheme in rural India with some success, the objective being to prevent further migration to the overswell of cities in that country. Mr. Mitchell likened the unemployment situation to a train departing the station every day with 20% of passengers left behind on the platform. Such a situation cannot continue indefinitely.

As a fairly new Deputy, I get the impression, unfortunately, that there is no move to abandon the existing model. The tendency is to adopt an attitude of business as usual. The reality, however, is that this is no longer sufficient. Mr. O'Connor has argued that the stimulus plan the Government introduced goes only one third of the way towards what is required. When I do the sums, it seems clear that even if we go the further two thirds of the way, we will still have a level of unemployment.

The reality is that the potential labour force of the unemployed includes a variety of people, from those who cannot write their name on an application form right up to those who could write a book about their name and from where it came. This highlights the difficulties in trying to generate employment reach for those in education and training. Will Mr. Strauss elaborate on Bill Mitchell's concept?

I read the fantastic Forfás report before the summer recess. However, there are some elements that are not highlighted enough. As Senator Clune said earlier in private session, sometimes we do not need to educate somebody up to third level as one can acquire the required skills elsewhere, particularly in the IT sector. For example, the FIT initiative for fast-track training in information technology has a 75% job replacement rate with the long-term unemployed, upskilling them over six to 18 months. This is for jobs a person with a university degree could do, although they would not use all the skills they learned with the degree.

I get the sense our fiscal policy is being treated better than our employment policy. We are in unusual times and our employment policy should be as important as our fiscal policy. As Mr. Jack O'Connor said, the elephant in the room is that we are in a country programme and it is excruciatingly difficult to start any activation package. We cannot keep telling people we are training them for jobs that do not exist. We must also look elsewhere at what other jobs we can create that will benefit communities. Most of the unemployed want a job and a sense of engagement. While we cannot offer everyone a highly qualified job, we can offer people a reason to get up every day and be close to the labour market.

As we have been good so far in using Structural Funds, it is not acceptable that we should not have access to the next phase of funding. I hope Mr. Strauss relays to the Commission that it is not right that we cannot have access to the next set of Structural Funds. We need to operate with a sense of urgency. However, we are not operating in such a way as to address ongoing issues with unemployment.