Mr. John McKeon:

As committee members probably know, the youth guarantee was agreed to in July during the Irish Presidency of the European Union. It is an agreement that the Heads of State and Government of Europe will work together to try to address the issue of youth unemployment, which is currently running from a level of approximately 22% to 23% around Europe. In Ireland it is 29% and in countries such as Spain and Greece possibly in excess of 60%, whereas in others such as Germany it is approximately 8% or 9%. These levels of unemployment mean that there are approximately 5.5 million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 years who are not at work, education and training. This represents a loss of productive capacity in Europe of a couple of percentage points of GDP. The proposal is that governments should work together to try to get to a situation where no young person would spend more than four months out of work without receiving an offer of further education, training or work. This is an ambitious objective and in recognition of this, the European Union has provided a fund of €6 billion across its member countries which are being asked to prepare implementation plans to bid for some of this money. We are in the process of preparing an implementation plan for Ireland which must be submitted by the end of December. A departmental group of senior officials is involved in preparing the plan supported by the OECD which we have engaged to help us draft it.

I caution against expecting that Ireland will receive a significant amount of money under the scheme because there is a precise formula for how much a country can receive, even with the best plan in the world. The amount to be allocated is related to the percentage of youth unemployment in the country and the number unemployed. We are hopeful we will receive some funding from the European Union, but we will not have the plan prepared until December when we will bring it to the Government for submission to the Union at the end of that month.