Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

When driving in through Dublin this morning past James's Street and Thomas Street, I saw a long queue on the footpath. I wondered what the queue was, but I later found it was the queue for the unemployment exchange. There were at least 50 people in the queue at 9.30 a.m. When I got in here I rang my secretary in Limerick, and without my telling her what I had seen, she told me that this morning at around the same time she was on Parnell Street and saw a queue that was coming around the corner from the labour exchange in Dominick Street and down a long alleyway as far as Parnell Street. There were at least 100 people in the queue, if not more. I have no doubt these queues are reproduced around the country because we know that the number of unemployed is rapidly increasing. We are back to the days of long dole queues.

This Government has got to do something about it. Its members cannot sit idly by and preen themselves proudly about what they have done for the banks. These are real, individual people with real families and real lives. Somebody should sit down and talk to every single one of them, instead of sitting behind a hatch and asking them their RSI numbers and maybe, if they are lucky, handing them out a few bob to keep them going. Somebody should be talking to them about who they are, what they want, where they were working and where they might work again. We cannot allow this to happen. We need to match up the people who are unemployed with the work that needs to be done. That is precisely what the Labour Party is proposing in terms of schemes for school buildings, for improving houses and so on.

Last weekend I met a young apprentice plumber who had only three months left in a four-year apprenticeship when he was let go. He had tried every other plumbing firm in the area and he could not get a job. Those apprenticeships need to be picked up. If there are no employers with whom these young people can finish their apprenticeships the State must do it. There are jobs to be done. I was in Limerick Senior College, a PLC college, this week. Water was dripping in through the roof, but the summer works scheme is gone, and with it any chance of getting it fixed. There is a school in Kilfinane, County Limerick, which has been mentioned in the House many times, in which the children must cross the yard to go to the toilet, but it is not on the list of the Minister, Deputy Batt O'Keeffe, this year.

We need to match the people being made unemployed with the work that needs to be done, and we need the Government to do this quickly because those people will become long-term unemployed if nobody talks to them or takes an interest in their individual cases before they lose hope. I urge the Minister to be proactive in this regard. We are making specific concrete proposals, but the Government needs to come forward with proposals as well. The Government members are the people who have the power to make something happen for these real people with real lives.

There are more than 3,000 people in my constituency working in Dell, but they do not know what will be happening in the future. We will be raising this matter later on the Adjournment. People in Shannon Airport, Dublin Airport and Cork Airport working for Aer Lingus do not know what is to happen to their jobs. Many other people, including those in small firms as mentioned by my colleagues, do not know what will happen. We need a practical, proactive response. I am not talking about FÁS putting on a few courses that people may or may not find out about and which may or may not be suitable for them. We need to focus on individuals and their needs, whether it be a FÁS course, a higher education course or a job somewhere they can fit into. I am particularly concerned about construction workers. I know many construction workers who spend their evenings online looking for jobs in the Middle East and Australia. This should not be happening in a country that was so rich up to so recently.

I urge the Government to do something practical about this. In the area of health, there are physiotherapists qualifying this year from universities in Ireland who have already gone abroad because there are no jobs for them. At the same time there are elderly people sitting at home who need physiotherapists and who are thinking they will have to go into an institution because they cannot move around in their own homes. Their home help hours have been cut and they cannot get extensions, downstairs toilets or whatever they need to be able to stay at home, as mentioned by my colleague Deputy Ciarán Lynch earlier. The Government needs to start matching the needs of the people with those of the economy, and it must do it quickly.

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