Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

I wish to share time with Deputy English. I am surprised but glad to have an opportunity to speak on this motion and thank the Labour Party for bringing it forward. Anybody who knocked on doors in the recent local, European and by-election campaigns will know there is one issue above all else that families and people in general across the country are concerned about, which is employment. Up to an average of 1,000 people per day have lost their jobs since the start of the year and the response from the Government has been totally inadequate in terms of prioritising the protection of jobs and creating new jobs and opportunities for those who have lost their jobs.

For the people unfortunate enough to lose employment, many of whom are highly employable, skilled and motivated people, the way in which we are treating them in terms of immediate access to social welfare payments, entitlements and retraining is simply not good enough. I have said this repeatedly and my party has argued this since January.

With regard to the challenges that State bodies like FÁS, for example, face, the response is not good enough. At a minimum, we should ensure that people get their social welfare entitlements within a week to provide at least some income into households when people lose their jobs. That has not happened. In certain parts of Cork city and county, it is taking between 11 and 13 weeks for people who have lost employment to access social welfare payments that they are entitled to, which is not good enough.

This party has proposed a job protection strategy to prioritise the needs of employers and small businesses in particular in order to keep people in employment. I ask the Minister to consider those proposals in a serious way because they are meant as a practical response to the challenge of keeping people in employment. It is so much more expensive for the State and difficult for the people concerned to lose their jobs and find new employment than it is to keep people in employment in the first place.

We must be far more imaginative and consider what is working elsewhere in linking attempts to keep people in employment with some form of State sponsorship, which would be an alternative to a person otherwise finding himself or herself on the dole. There are ways in which we can do that and we should act more proactively.

We will reach a figure of 500,000 on the live register by the end of this year, which is a frightening figure. It is our job to find solutions that will look to minimise that figure and, most important, look to dramatically reverse the trend next year of rapidly increasing unemployment in Ireland.

The Government must look at ways to create jobs and new employment that are recession-friendly. The building of infrastructure in a recession makes much sense because it is labour intensive. This would engage people formerly working in the construction sector, from where a significant percentage of the unemployed have come. Ireland needs a dramatic upgrade in its water, rail, or telecommunications infrastructure in particular. It also needs better energy infrastructure.

We have made very proactive and positive proposals as to how we would fund that without requiring the State to borrow more money. The Government should not dismiss those proposals, as has been done by the Minister of State's colleagues, by arguing that Fine Gael wants to create more quangos. We have focused on the creation of new State companies that would borrow on the basis of commercial return to create the kind of new employment we are talking about. That proposal has been tested and is worth serious consideration by the Government, which it is not getting currently.

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