Mr. Jack O'Connor:

I thank the Chair. We have circulated a short document. Although it is well known, it is important to say that the challenge faced by the Government and by society is on a scale which has not been experienced before. In the four years between 2008 and 2011 Ireland recorded the largest number of job losses, relatively speaking, in any economy across the industrialised world since the Great Depression. It is important to say that is the scale of it.

I will restrict myself to saying three things today because we are in the process of preparing pre-budget submissions and we are awaiting appropriate approval for what we might say. The first point - no disrespect is intended - is that there is something perverse about all of us discussing how to get young people into jobs that do not exist. It is important that we all recognise the elephant in the room, which is that the one-sided austerity approach which has been imposed upon us is not working. We will not succeed in addressing the problem by tricking about with schemes, monitoring them and so on. In order to get people into employment we have to create jobs and in order to do that we have to address the issue of domestic demand and consumption. It is one thing to find ourselves in the situation, as we all do, that we must go along with a recipe that has been imposed. It is another thing to delude ourselves that it is working because that leads to all sorts of other wrong conclusions.

As one who quotes Karl Marx from time to time, I never thought I would see the day when I would be before the committee espousing the virtues of Ben Bernanke, a Republican, who last Thursday evening or Friday morning showed the way forward. The way is the common sense way. I mean no personal offence to Mr. Robert Strauss when I say that he might tell someone over there that countries need space to generate jobs and growth. I imagine he is saying it but they are probably not listening to him either. It is a serious point. If one does not recognise it then one goes down all sorts of culs-de-sac trying to engage in alchemy.

The first point is that we are stuck with the troika programme. We should say we are stuck with it. We should not try to delude ourselves that it is working. We must find a way to gradually step away from it and generate domestic demand in the economy. In the period between 1992 and 1997 when we had enormous and unprecedented success, something of the order of 600,000 jobs were generated within the economy.

These were all sustainable jobs rather than jobs that were created as a result of the bubble. Only 14% of the jobs to which I refer were attributable to exports, etc. The remainder were created as a result of what happened domestically.

We wish to highlight two initiatives. We are not saying that it is not possible to do absolutely anything but we are saying that there is a need to try to mobilise the resources which are available in order to generate some activity in the economy. As the Chairman will be aware, the trade union movement previously articulated a detailed proposal for a stimulus plan which envisaged pumping upwards of €3 billion per annum into the economy to be spent primarily on infrastructural projects. We produced a policy document with which the Chairman and many of his colleagues will be familiar and which is well costed. The Government announced an initiative prior to the summer recess which went approximately one third of the way required in this regard. The announcement to which I refer was welcome but we strongly urge that the Government go the other two thirds of the way. We estimated that what was envisaged in our plan - this was not challenged by anybody - would generate of the order of 30,000 jobs. Our figures in this regard were based on analysis carried out by the CIC and Department of Finance.

We wish to draw the committee's attention to work we are undertaking in conjunction with a number of employers in the manufacturing sector. This work is focused on promoting innovation and creating a context within which existing manufacturing plants in this country would be able to compete for site-of-choice status in the context of new investment and so on. The initiative to which I refer is being promoted by our ideas institute, which is headed up by Mr. Ron Kelly who would be happy to answer any questions members may wish to pose. This initiative started on a very small scale and we are now working with 40 companies throughout the country in respect of it. Basically, it is aimed at creating a context within which we can preserve existing jobs and also compete for new investment by corporations, etc. The initiative is meeting with a considerable degree of success.

We will be making further points in our pre-budget submission. In light of this fact, I will leave it at that for now.