Seán Kyne (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the delegation from the National Youth Council of Ireland and thank them for the presentation, which was interesting and informative. I am surprised by some of the figures mentioned earlier, including the 47% of immigrants employed in full-time jobs, which would suggest there is a level of under-employment, and also the figure of 39.5% wishing to return. I thought that would be higher in terms of people wishing to come back to the country in the next three years. Is it that people do not believe they will be able to come back and therefore it was easier to say they do not want to come back, if that makes any sense?

I am also surprised by the figures on the countries of choice in that 24% of emigrants go to the United Kingdom, which is not a surprise, 17% to Australia and 6% to Canada but 16% go to the European Union 12 and 13% to the EU 15, which is around 30% of the EU 27 as it was at the time. That would suggest that the language skills are not as bad as I assumed they were because we always hear that Irish people have relatively low language skills. Was Ms McAleer surprised by that?