Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)

I welcome the motion from the Labour Party. The Fine Gael amendment reads:

to delete all words after "employment" in the second last paragraph and substitute the following paragraphs:

"—access to a local employment service for every unemployed person;

maintaining investment in NDP projects that will improve our competitiveness such as metro and broadband;

a total overhaul of FÁS to ensure that training and upskilling programmes are effective in terms of outcome and efficient in the use of tax-payers money;

embarking on a radical programme to reduce the administrative cost of regulation by 25% using the International Standards Cost Model."

There is no question that the current position regarding unemployment is very worrying as there are now over 240,000 people on the live register. It will clearly break 250,000 by next month and by January it will be over 270,000, meaning the numbers signing on will be higher than when former Deputies John Bruton and Dick Spring left power 11 or 12 years ago.

At 6.1% — the standardised unemployment rate, which is the internationally comparable figure — our unemployment is now higher than in America, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Japan, Israel, Luxembourg and Norway. I could go on. It is pretty clear that within the next few months we will overtake Italy, and within the next year we will probably overtake France and Germany as well. Once again we are becoming a country of relatively high unemployment.

I welcome the Labour motion, which I agree with thoroughly. I concur that a major school building programme could help employment and I agree with the proposal on a national insulation scheme. I have always been between two minds with the county enterprise boards but Deputy English has convinced me on that point, as well as the lead-in time for the back to education allowance. Deputy Enright will comment on that, as well as the community employment schemes.

Some 25,000 people are now involved in such schemes and to be honest, they statistically have little value as an active labour market measure. They have very strong and important value in terms of social employment. Members of my extended family who suffer from mental illness have done very well on community employment schemes and there may well be a case over the coming months and years to begin increasing the number of such schemes again, particularly as one considers welfare payments are largely being replaced with payments for doing something. There is a strong case for this, particularly if the schemes are freed from the dead hand of FÁS, which adds additional costs and little benefit. I expect local authorities would do a much better job.

There is probably only one small aspect of the Labour Party motion I do not agree with, the proposal to improve access to the jobs initiative. This initiative is really being abandoned by Government and rightly so. The entry is closed and the scheme is being scaled down, which is the right measure. It was so ineffective in getting long-term unemployed people back to work that a decision was made to cancel it, which was correct. If we are to act on the long-term unemployed, we must do something new. To bring back a scheme that cost a fortune and did not work would not be something I would not agree with.

Our amendment would add some ideas, as dealing with unemployment will not just be about State supports and spending. We will also have to create the environment of job creation. When this Government took power 11 or 12 years ago, Ireland was a great place to employ people. Our costs were low and there was an available work force with the skills to match but that is all being eroded. The basis for the Celtic tiger economy has been worn away over the last ten years. We have provided one or two things to help.

The first is ongoing investment in the national development plan projects, especially those that make sense such as school building, the metro and broadband in particular. That is another area where we have fallen behind. When the rainbow Government left power we were the fourth most competitive economy in the world. Today, according to the World Economic Forum, we lie in 22nd place despite the efforts of the National Competitiveness Council and all the talk we heard from the Ministers, Deputy Micheál Martin and Mary Coughlan, over the years. They have achieved nothing with respect to improving competitiveness in the past six years, an indictment of the way our economy has been run.

We have identified the issue of regulation and the use of the standard cost model in particular. This will first assess the cost of regulation to business and then bring it down.

Unemployment is without doubt a growing and real problem. I am disappointed with the blasé response we have received from Ministers to date and welcome the motion from the Labour Party. I particularly welcome that it is full of ideas and suggestions as to what we can do to help people who are losing their jobs, as they will suffer the most in the coming months. All of us with jobs will pay a little bit more, those on welfare will get a little more but the people who will really suffer are those who are losing their jobs. They will lose perhaps 75% of their income almost overnight. That is where we should focus our concern.

This debate really shows a difference between Labour, which has suggested so many good ideas; Fine Gael, which has made some suggestions also; and a Government which has not taken a single initiative in the last year to deal with the crisis.

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