Mr. James Doorley:

I thank members for the invitation to speak today. The National Youth Council of Ireland is a representative body for about 45 national voluntary youth organisations across the country. We certainly welcome the opportunity to speak about the youth guarantee. We have been working on youth unemployment for a number of years, and as far back as March 2011 we called for an examination of a youth guarantee in Ireland. The Department has already outlined the context and background so I will not talk about the "why". I think we all agree on the need for a youth guarantee. I want to talk about the "how" - how can we make this happen and how we can make it work. We would acknowledge that it will be challenging to deliver a guaranteed place for every young person who has been unemployed or out of the education system for four months or more, but we think it can be done. I would like to present some of what we consider to be the key components of the youth guarantee, many of which have been mentioned by Mr. McKeon and Ms Whelan. I will go through them very quickly.

Perhaps it sounds like common sense, but the concept of a guarantee does have a certain currency in our language. Given that young people are facing a very difficult labour market and many challenges and frustrations, if we go out there and sell them the idea of a guarantee, we must also meet our side of the bargain. We think it can be done, but we must be very careful not to over-promise and under-deliver because that would be a further frustration for them. We should strive as a country to implement the best youth guarantee in Europe because it is something that will affect the entire European Union. We must also be realistic and say that if we are going to deliver a quality youth guarantee, we must make the investment. There is no point in saying it can be done on the cheap. The reality is that it cannot. I acknowledge that Ireland is not Sweden and the context is very different, but under the Swedish model, based on the number of young people unemployed for six months or longer, it would cost approximately €273 per annum.

We welcome the allocation of €14 million in the budget but that has to be only an initial allocation. Funding is also available from the European Union. The Department will be more familiar with the details but we understand the Irish Government can get back up to 66% if it puts the money up front. We need to put young jobseekers at the centre of the decision-making process because it is their futures we are discussing. We hear a lot about passive activation and schemes. We want to support young people in getting engaged with their career choices, but they have to be active participants. Our work with young people shows they are concerned about the key career choices that are being made. In many cases, they see their engagement with the Department and the various services as an interview. It is an opportunity for them to make key career choices. We would like to see a "reasons why" document for any decisions made on a choice so that the participant can ask whether a course will allow him or her to progress along a career path. Young people are realistic and they understand they are in a difficult labour market, but they also want to know they are going somewhere.

We definitely need to offer a diversity of options for young jobseekers because they are not a homogenous group. We have young people with significant qualifications but who lack work experience and others who left school at the age of 13 or 14 years and have been out of the education system. Their needs are very different. The youth guarantee offers an opportunity to prepare a diversity of options. The EUROFOUND document published last year thoroughly examined this issue and demonstrated that the youth guarantee can only work if a diversity of options are available. The Department has pointed to the need to provide enterprise and self-employment options as well as a range of training and educational supports. I attended a meeting in Cavan at which a young man in his early 20s asked how the youth guarantee would help him as an entrepreneur.

All of us, including the Department, face a challenge in deciding where to start. There are 63,000 young people on the live register, of whom approximately 28,000 have been on it for one year or longer. The question arises of whether we start there, with young people who have been on the live register for longer, or with those who are most disadvantaged. Our view is that we should start with the young people who most need our support because we are concerned about that group being left behind. In the context of the good news that the labour market may be picking up, those young people will not get jobs unless they get support now. It is welcome that we are joined by somebody who is working at local level in youth services, and as a Tipperary man I am glad Tipperary Regional Youth Service will be making a presentation. Hundreds or thousands of such groups are working with young people around the country. It is important that we harness the capacity of the youth, community and voluntary sector. This work cannot be done by the State alone. The Department has been clear in that regard. Several months ago we sent a submission to the Department of Children and Youth Affairs proposing the establishment of an innovation fund to support the youth, community and voluntary sector in engaging with young people around the youth guarantee, particularly the most disadvantaged young people.

As the representative from Ballymun noted, high-quality career guidance and counselling are crucial. We do not have sufficient case workers to engage with young jobseekers. In many cases, young jobseekers do not have work experience and they do not know where they are going in life. When I left school, which was neither today nor yesterday, I was unemployed for six months or longer. I recall what it was like to be in that space of confusion about what I wanted to do. It is crucial to provide a good career guidance intervention at that stage. A considerable number of schemes and initiatives have been established but they can be quite complex and the eligibility criteria differ. It can be challenging to deal with a young person who has been unemployed for only four months but would be perfect for a scheme that requires him or her to have been unemployed for six months. We might provide greater flexibility so that a local case worker can make a decision where a candidate does not fill all the criteria but would perfectly fit a course.

Engagement with local employers is key. We need to give young people education, training and work experience that is relevant to local labour markets. I understand the Department is working on providing independent and rigorous monitoring and evaluation from the start. Given that money is so short and the crisis so immense, we should not spend money if it will not deliver results for young people. This is why we should not carry out evaluations two or three years down the line, so that we are told what worked or what did not; we should have evaluation up-front that tells us what works from the outset. However, we need agreement on how we measure success. Our major consideration has to be getting young people off the live register and into jobs, but we must also acknowledge that some young people have to deal with significant challenges. The evaluation and monitoring must also reflect what we would call the distance travelled. A young person who has been out of education for several years will not get into a job in 12 months' time. We must consider where he or she was 12 months ago compared to his or her current position. If we focus solely on getting people off the live register there is a danger that we will churn people through temporary employment and they will end up back on the register. We must develop a meaningful and sustainable progression into decent work.