Mr. James Doorley:

The long-term unemployed figure for young people is 30,000. The €6 billion is welcome but perhaps Mr. Higgins has more expertise on that issue and I will leave it to him. Anyway, there is an issue in that the Irish Government will have to provide matching funding and this is something we need to address. I do not believe that somehow all of this money will come from Europe. Sometimes there is a sense that it will always come from Europe but we know that is not the case. However, Ireland is in a strong position to draw down significant resources from the fund.

We are keen to put the issue of the private sector on the table. The private sector benefits from the education and training of young people and many sectors of the economy have vacancies. There is a question of whether the private sector could contribute as well. It is clear that there is a lack of capacity. If the Government decided to implement a youth guarantee in the morning, we simply would not have sufficient training, education or work experience places. I am not suggesting it cannot be ramped up over time, but we certainly need to consider that issue. Another issue we have identified is that there has not been the right emphasis. We need a national emphasis but we need to engage with groups at local level as well. I imagine all Deputies and Senators are aware of great work that is being done at local level. We should engage with the community and voluntary sectors to deliver some of these places as well as ramping up schemes such as Youthreach and others.

It is important we do not increase the number of places for the sake of it. We must have regard to equality and progression. We need to ensure young people benefit from the programme, especially young people who have had a bad experience of the education system and who perhaps have other issues. Such people may need longer-term supports to enable them to get the benefits from education and training. Some young people may have literacy or addiction issues and we believe we need to do more in that regard. We do not want a situation whereby a young person goes through the youth guarantee process but ends up in a part-time or temporary job on low pay, because he or she will simply end up back on the live register within a short period.

We need to put in considerable efforts in Ireland to determine how we can implement this in the best way possible and how to make the best use of resources. There is also another concern. The United Kingdom introduced what was known as a payment-by-results model. The Irish Government is considering the introduction of third parties from the private sector to the activation system. As far as I am aware in the United Kingdom, the payment-by-results model involved getting a cohort of people off the live register and moving them into employment. Those responsible were paid based on the percentage of those who were brought into employment. However, some of those people were progressed into not very satisfactory employment. There was also a tendency to cherry pick those who were close to the labour market and those who needed least support. We need to consider these issues carefully.

We believe there is a need to concentrate primarily on the most disadvantaged young people. We are now four or five years into the crisis. One could argue that we are heading towards the previous scenario again but we do not want to create the problem which we had in the 1980s and 1990s whereby we created a cohort of people who were long-term unemployed and who needed a great deal of support to get back into the labour force. In particular we are calling for an emphasis on the long-term unemployed, especially the 30,000 people who have been unemployed for more than one year and the 17,000 people who have been unemployed for two years. They need a particular focus. The youth guarantees in Sweden and Finland, which have been quite successful, were not as successful with this cohort. We believe that the youth sector and the organisations we represent, which are working with young people and which have credibility in communities, could play a role. We have already spoken to the Government in this regard and in terms of putting forward proposals that some of the money coming from the youth guarantee should be designated to address the hardest to reach and the most disadvantaged young people. If it is not, there is a danger they will be marginalised and left behind once again. I will leave it there but I will be glad to answer any questions later.