Joanna Tuffy (Dublin Mid West, Labour)

I want to speak about the Labour Party's viewpoint on the jobs crisis and the economy and how it differs from the viewpoint expressed by the Government and many other interested parties in our society. We believe that creating jobs and rebuilding the economy go hand in hand. Second, we believe it is possible to build a better society and economy in the process of creating jobs and that issues such as climate change, protecting the environment and building a more sustainable economy for the future can be addressed at the same time. We can build a knowledge-based economy and a society based on good human values such as equality, care for others and fostering a sense of community.

The third aspect of our viewpoint on the jobs crisis and the economy is that lack of action and lack of engagement with people who are becoming unemployed is wasteful of such human capacity. It is wasteful of people's time. It could be wasteful of years in our history in terms of what we could have done with existing potential. The small amount the Government is doing in terms of people who are unemployed is causing hardship. We will be a poorer society as a result. We will have more people living in poverty and it will take us longer to get out of the recession.

The Labour Party's approach and outlook is different from what has held sway, and continues to hold sway, with the Government for at least the past 12 years. The Government's policy now and the policy that many economists, media and other commentators believe needs to be implemented is all part of the same package that has been the economic and political approach. Part of it was that we should spend like mad when we have money and then cut like mad because we are in a recession. We should depend on the private sector to solve problems, let the free market operate, have less regulation, allow crazy land and financial speculation and allow the interests of the few to be the predominant dictator of policy. When Deputy Dooley spoke about what we should do about the job situation, he expressed that point of view because he said the important approach was to first sort out the banking situation and then wait for the multinational companies to step in.

The Labour Party has a fundamentally different view on that and, thankfully, there is more discourse in Irish society now about a different economic outlook and approach. For example, Tasc has set up a website, www.progressiveeconomy.ie, on which various economists express a different outlook to the predominant one that prevailed in recent years. Professor James Galbraith was the guest speaker at a recent lecture organised by Tasc. He gave an alternative point of view and one that, historically, has been successful. It is basically the approach taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States when he implemented the New Deal. Professor Galbraith refers in one of his papers to another author who talked about Roosevelt and what he did. When Roosevelt was addressing the problem of unemployment, he hired 60% of the unemployed to do public works, conservation projects and work on projects such as school buildings, maintaining parks, refurbishment of public buildings and so on.

We must do what we can to promote and encourage the private sector to create new jobs but the real driver in creating jobs and dealing with the jobs crisis must be the Government. It must work in a proactive way that we are not seeing currently. The idea that in a recession the private sector will step in and solve our jobs problem is unrealistic. It will not happen. If the money and demand are not there the private sector will not create vast numbers of jobs. That is why we need to do things such as the Labour Party is suggesting. We must build badly needed infrastructure such as school buildings and put construction workers back to work. If we borrow for capital expenditure we will get money back into the Exchequer because the workers will pay taxes and spend money. We should put people to work on projects to do with protecting our environment and place them on community employment schemes. I benefited from a CE scheme, or its equivalent, at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, which meant I was not sitting at home on the dole. However, we now expect people to sit at home until the private sector solves the problem, as usual. It is not going to happen. We need the type of intervention the Labour Party calls for in its motion.

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