Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I have been very taken aback by the fatalism about unemployment that the Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen, and his Government have continuously displayed. We know the Government greeted the collapse of the building bubble with disbelief. We saw it handle the banking crisis in a way that was inept. We cannot allow the Government to approach unemployment in the same disastrous "know-nothing" way.

This June and September thousands of young people will leave college as newly qualified graduates. At the same time, many thousands more, particularly young men, will leave school hoping to get an apprenticeship. These young people are the best and the brightest and signing on the dole should not be an option for them.

I challenge the Government to develop new and innovative programmes to get such people into real work, traineeships, internships and apprenticeships. I want the Government to set targets for how many teaching and arts graduates for whom we can gainfully create traineeships and graduate internships in primary, secondary, third level and adult education. If the Government does nothing and people simply sign on, this will, at a crude economic level, cost the Government €200 per person per week. However, it will also cost the dreams and aspirations of a new generation that should be required to contribute productively to the country.

Professor Tom Collins in Maynooth recently sketched out the bones of such a scheme for the primary sector. This is what I call positive thinking. Properly done, we could persuade the European Union that this kind of scheme should receive the equivalent of European Social Fund support as part of one of the programme of measures that will kick-start the European economy, not least in Ireland. However, with Fianna Fáil now hanging around the European liberals in Europe, I doubt we will hear of any positive job creation in Fianna Fáil's programme for Europe.

If we could do this for teachers and for the education sector in general, we could then address it to disciplines such as architecture, law and business. The skills of graduates in these areas could be utilised not just in the commercial sector, but in local authorities, community and voluntary organisations. People taking part in such schemes would be required, as a condition of participation, to continue their education to further appropriate levels, be that apprentice qualifications or, in the case of graduates, a masters' qualification.

The Government needs to think outside the box to give a sense of hope and purpose to people who are already unemployed or graduates, many of whom feel they have not much reason to graduate. I speak about this with some confidence because in 1993-94, as Minister of State in the Department of Social Welfare dealing with poverty and unemployment issues, I helped to pioneer a series of back-to-work and work schemes. Up to then, for example, students got the dole in summer time. However, following the introduction of the schemes we created, student summer schemes provided many students with gainful and interesting employment in their local GAA clubs, community centres or elsewhere. I remember sitting down with combined students unions that protested that as students they wanted to retain the dole. However, the dole should not be a lifestyle option for anybody, least of all well educated students.

Last week, I and other Deputies met staff from SR Technics. These are highly skilled workers and apprentices most countries would kill to have, yet the Government seems entirely uncertain of how to create pathways from redundancy for them. Our universities and institutes of technology must be challenged to start making themselves seriously attractive to people who have become unemployed. So far, access programmes have been tinkering around the edges in terms of numbers. If this is a national emergency and if the Taoiseach's numbers on unemployment are correct, then third level colleges must use their tremendous resources for the common good.

A traditional FÁS course will not necessarily do the trick this time round. In any event, FÁS as an organisation, like our banks, has problems that run so deep that it would be unwise to put all our hopes for up-skilling, training and re-education into that particular basket. We should let our third level colleges compete and if FÁS can compete with a better offer, well and good. The biggest bottleneck currently is that to avail of most Government schemes, people must first be registered unemployed for quite a long period. The Government must create initiatives that will prevent people going on the dole in the first place. It is a hopeless Government, but must it keep acting hopelessly towards the unemployed?

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