Mr. Jack O'Connor:

I wish to address Senator Quinn's point regarding entrepreneurship, with which I would not really disagree. However, we must be sure we know what we are talking about because we have gone through a long period of confusing speculators and swindlers with entrepreneurs.

There is actually a role for the State in promoting a culture of entrepreneurship. However, there are issues around support, guidance and the provision of seed capital. In our original proposition for the infrastructure fund, we had the idea of providing a development fund and were discussing concepts such as risk sharing and so on.

I wish to make a point that is relevant to Senator Feargal Quinn's contribution. We did not say very much about our innovation in manufacturing initiative today. That initiative is about connecting everybody in the workplace with the task of job retention and creation. Our point is that management is too important to be left solely to managers. What we are endeavouring to do is meet with a measure of success in a number of employments. The Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation might be interested in a presentation on the concept. The idea is to challenge traditional notions on where people's responsibilities begin and end and make the task of job preservation and generation a bigger issue than a task somebody else does.

Deputy Michael Conaghan raised the issue of apprenticeships. Mr. Strauss has mentioned that central European countries have a linkage with the vocational education institutions. I understand also that employers have much better linkages with the institutions than we seem to have. They seem to be able to project the needs in cities and so on and plan for them. As we said, in Ireland there is a preoccupation with academia vis-à-vis apprenticeships. Economies that are more successful seem to have a higher proportion of their people taking up apprenticeships, but the structure of the apprenticeship system is well developed.

We identify the problem as putting the cart before the horse, which is imposed on us all, despite our disagreements. We fix the banks and everything else, with the hope the communities to which Deputy Conaghan referred will fall into place and that people will get jobs. What is happening in Ireland and some European countries as a consequence is that a very sorry scenario is developing. We talk about the crisis in the financial system. There is no crisis. To echo Senator Mary White's remarks, there is no crisis as big as the employment crisis, particularly the youth unemployment crisis. No crisis has the potential to damage our society in the medium to longer term more than the unemployment crisis. We are, therefore, putting the cart before the horse. If we could get people back to work, we could fix the banks. However, there is no point repeating this as nobody listens.