Mr. James Doorley:

I shall comment in terms of the NYCI's sense of the youth guarantee concerning the 18 to 25 years cohort. It would help if the youth guarantee was implemented, as it is supposed to be, and every young person received a personal development plan or some sort of a map that stated what help will be provided over a period of a year or two. I am not saying that such a provision would stop all emigration. It would stem the flow and young people would feel that they were making some progression. Ms McAleer made the following point.

As the report showed, many young people were in full-time jobs but were not certain how long those jobs would last or perhaps the conditions were fairly poor. If young people have a particular qualification and have no prospects of getting a job in that area, they will make what I think are very rational decisions. A young person will say he or she is qualified to be a health professional, for example, but is currently working in a service industry, does not know how long he or she will be in it and that it is better to go to another jurisdiction, such as Canada or Australia, to get a job for which he or she is qualified. At least his or her qualification is being used because he or she knows that if he or she hangs around for five years until jobs become available here in that area, the chances are that an employer will say he or she has never worked in that area and will ask what he or she has been doing. I think young people make very rational choices.

I refer to the issue of young people feeling their lives are being postponed. If one is in a poorly paid job with poor conditions, one cannot put down any roots. That came up in our study a few years ago and it came up in Ms McAleer's work in that young people see that they can get a job in the area in which they are qualified and can actually make some good money. We think the youth guarantee would give people some certainty.

Some 62% of those leaving have a third level qualification. That says to me that those leaving have qualifications and maybe have some resources. Young people who do not have qualifications and maybe do not have any family resources or resources of their own are in a more difficult situation. Emigration is not an option for them because they know that if they go to Canada, Australia or some other jurisdiction, it will be hard to get a job because they do not have qualifications and they do not have the €1,000 to fly to Canada or Australia. That is why the youth guarantee is very important because emigration is not a safety valve for many young people here. We think that if it was implemented properly, it would give young people some sense of certainty and a path, which is what many of them want but do not have currently.

When we meet groups from abroad, they are shocked that in a small country with a population of 4.4 million, huge numbers have left. They ask about long-term planning in the labour market, leaving aside the social cost. Hopefully, in five to ten years' time, we will not have these levels of unemployment and this huge cohort of people whose qualifications we do not really know. We know roughly how many people have gone but we do not know how many engineers have left the country. We cannot train an engineer overnight in that a person must go through college and so on. We could actually have labour shortages where we must bring people from other jurisdictions in to fill the vacancies. We need to do a bit more long-term planning and hope the jobs will be there.

How can we keep in contact? We are not doing that. The sense is that these young people have gone and we are not doing anything to give them a sense that we want them to come back. They are coming back for the all-Ireland and for family events but there is a sense that they are gone. Maybe Ms McAleer would know more than I would but they feel they have been a bit forgotten about.