Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

On behalf of the Labour Party, I want to thank everyone who contributed to the debate, including Sinn Féin and in particular my colleague Deputy Willie Penrose for tabling the motion.

Recovery in terms of the economy and Irish society is about jobs - retaining and creating them - and about creating pathways for people who have become unemployed to retrain, upskill and get work experience. Particularly for young graduates and qualified apprentices, it is about bridging the gap and giving them an opportunity to get work experience while the economy is in recession and depression.

I remind the Minister of State that there are now 86,600 young people under 25 on the dole. That is an enormous increase from the 31,700 on the dole at the time of the last general election. All of the research in this country and internationally shows that when a young person goes on the dole and where the period of unemployment passes the six months mark and goes on for over a year, it becomes very difficult for him or her to get back into work, partly because he or she becomes unattractive to employers and demotivated. In particular if he or she lives in an area of high unemployment it is noticeable that the whole psychology of the area goes down.

Deputy McManus has just told the House how, in Bray, a very important town in population terms, there is no proper jobs centre. What is the Government doing in terms of bringing hope and opportunity to people who have been knocked for six by the current crisis in the economy? Most of these young people have gone on to college and held high hopes and expectations. At the moment the Government seems to have nothing to offer them.

With regard to the fourth level research centre initiative, before Christmas the Government launched a report about the knowledge and the smart economy, an idea which the Labour Party strongly supports. In each of our third level institutions and research centres there are hundreds of exceptionally qualified young graduates who are doing research at doctoral and post-doctoral levels. At the moment in many of our institutions they are effectively being let go because they are contract workers. These people are extraordinarily valuable to this economy in terms of building up a world class scientific research base. Many of them were attracted home to Ireland from promising positions across the world and we are now letting them go and leaving them in a state of uncertainty regarding their future. It might be a post-doctoral researcher who finds that his or her contract is not being renewed or a young construction worker who might have left school at 16 or 17, seven or eight years ago and worked hard, became very entrepreneurial and now is being let go. Often such construction workers will have been self-employed and cannot, in most cases, even qualify for a social welfare or job seeker's allowance for a period of up to six months. The Government seems to have run out of ideas in terms of offering hope to people.

Dr. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics, wrote today in the New York Times, yet again, that deflation and cutting jobs is not the way to regrow the economy. In the United States President Obama and the new US Administration learned that lesson. However here we have, Fianna Fáil, the remnants of the PDs, who are now independents, and, unfortunately, the Green Party, who seem stuck in the economic dogma of 20 years ago. They are telling unemployed people that they are sorry for their trouble but there is not much they can do for them. This motion very clearly sets out all the alternatives that could be employed to get people back to work, training and education. We say to the Government, "why not have a general election and let us put our plans to the people?" I am very confident the people will give the Government their answer, as they did in the European and local elections.

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