Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. That was a long and detailed speech, so I will try to keep my contribution fairly short. The Minister of State said that some 30,000 recipients of the one-parent family payment with children over the age of seven years will transition from the payment in 2015 and that tailored child care schemes, including after-school care, have been introduced to support this process. What the Minister of State was referring to was 30,000 people losing their payment. The big argument that many lone parents are making to us, as politicians, is that the promised child care schemes are not there and the ones that are there are too costly. We are forcing people into employment without putting the supports in place. I think the Tánaiste said that child care would be a key element of these changes, but the spaces are not there. How is the Minister of State going to square that circle? It sounds positive that people are moving on with their lives, and I have not met any lone parent who does not want to get into employment. However, there are difficulties and barriers there. All the groups advocating on behalf of lone parents are saying that the child care spaces are not there and that is a big problem. We need to get our act together on this.

As regards the training schemes, the Minister of State said that 57,000 education and training places are reserved for the long-term unemployed in 2015, subject to demand. What does "subject to demand" mean? Does it mean that if people do not want to go on these schemes, they do not have to? That is not what I am being told. According to the Minister of State, a minimum of 16,000 places for long-term unemployed are being created in public employment programmes, including through the highly successful JobsPlus initiative. I was recently talking to a group of workers who were notified that they had to go on one of these schemes. There was one person under the age of 40 in the room. Many of them had skills - one was a tiler while another was a carpenter - and many of them had worked in the construction industry but for whatever reasons they have not been able to get back in to employment, even part-time. I would imagine that we need to be gearing a lot of those schemes towards young people. I do not know what training value those workers are going to get on this course. Some of it will be sweeping roads, cleaning up grass verges and so on, even though the argument was that they would be increasing their skill level. They were annoyed that they were being forced down this route. They certainly all want to get back into employment and want to upskill. What was being offered was clearly not enough.

Although we are told almost on a daily basis that we have regained our economic sovereignty and so on, Ministers are replying to questions by saying that EU rules will dictate our budget for a long time to come and that this happens through the semester. Our next budget will have to be against the backdrop of the so-called expenditure benchmark. I understand the Government is seeking greater flexibility in that regard but it seems like other countries within Europe are flagrantly disregarding the rules at the moment. We are coming in on the back of that and looking for greater flexibility, saying that it is arbitrary, even though we agreed to it.

The difficulty is that we are talking about balancing books with no understanding of the socio-economic cost of that so-called balancing. The Minister of State is talking in terms of jobs and so on. Ireland is second only to the US in terms of numbers in low-paid employment in the OECD. We are the highest in Europe. We may be talking about creating full employment, but at what cost? We have had the recent experience of Dunnes Stores as regards zero-hour contracts and so on. By all means, we need full employment and we all support that but I am concerned about the quality of the jobs we are creating.

Emigration is also a key issue. Recently, just under 4,000 jobs came on offer in Canada and the visas were gone within 12 minutes. Our young people are bright and intelligent with plenty of skills. Many of them are leaving jobs and emigrating because they do not have any hope. Collectively, it is part of our job to instil hope and show that there are alternatives. The biggest thing we need to do in Europe is instil in those in power the understanding that there are alternatives to the austerity we have faced up to now. Stimulus is the way forward and that is the big debate we need to bring to the table in Europe.