Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I am mystified by the dedication of €56 million to short FÁS course which the budget documents describe as ten to 20 week courses. As has been said by many other speakers, the short courses in FÁS, some of which, as Deputy Shortall said, are actually only of two to three weeks' duration, are of seriously limited value except where they are provided as part of an arrangement with an employer. I say this as one who has worked much in third level education. It is a form of insanity.

I do not know why the Government has not attempted to reform FÁS. I know it is not the Minister's brief but it is deeply disappointing to see that the only public information about FÁS this week is that the former director general, as part of his very generous package, has got a car worth €60,000. I do not particularly expect the man to go around on a bike or anything like that but it is unbelievable that FÁS is provided for in this way.

The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment is minus €50 million in the budget figures. That sum is made up, as has been said, of reductions to CE, to job initiatives and to Skillnets, which most Deputies would agree is actually pretty effective. They are all going down and, in return, we are getting €56 million in short courses of ten to 20 weeks duration, as described in the budget documents, and €20 million in activation measures. For the love of God, what about some of the people who are coming out of construction? They have worked hard, are very intelligent and have done well. They will be unemployed until they find something else to do in this economy. Even when construction picks up again, it will never be at the same level. Many of them need to be able to go back to school and college to qualify for areas like IT or engineering, where eventually there will be jobs. Instead, what they are being offered is these hopeless short courses of ten to 20 weeks duration, many of them provided by FÁS contractors. Let us face it, in everything we have heard about FÁS over the past year or so, we learned that many of the FÁS contractors have party political affiliations to Fianna Fáil. One wonders what is going to happen to the €56 million and €20 million.

The €20 million is in regard to activation measures. I hope the activation measures are open to private employers, NGOs and public sector bodies. We have put forward a graduate internship programme as a bridge to employment. Professor Blanchflower, a former member of the UK's Monetary Policy Committee, was in Dublin a month ago. I met him at length because he is one of the world's experts on unemployment among young people. There is so much research in this and other countries to show that if somebody becomes unemployed when they are a young adult aged 18 to about 25, the longer the unemployment lasts and the more scarring it is. If it lasts for more than a year and a half, the effects are still felt by most of those individuals when they are 40, because they have basically missed out on a critical time in their life when they are full of hope, expectation and energy, and want to do something. It is the time when they want to be their own person and want to be an adult - they want to be man out on a construction site, working with construction workers. Instead, what they are being offered is a diet of getting up late in the morning, watching videos. It is a lifestyle everyone here is familiar with and it is not conducive to strong personal development. Ten to 20 week courses are not the solution to that.

If the Government wants to spend that money, it could provide 10,000 places in community colleges and colleges of further education in the VECs, where there is a huge oversubscription by people looking for one to two year courses. That would then enable those people to go back to college and get a serious qualification for areas of the economy where there are and will be job vacancies, particularly through foreign direct investment. Just to pump it into FÁS without that organisation being reformed seems to be extraordinarily lax.

I wish to refer to fourth level researchers. We enticed back to Ireland some of the most qualified fourth level graduates who had done their PhDs abroad. They came back and are working in places like the centres in UCD, DCU, Trinity and DIT. Some of the teams they are working with have world class reputations. However, while they were enticed back, it was to contract employment. Many of them have commitments to mortgages because the understanding was, with the emphasis by the Government on the smart economy, that they could be looking at continued contracts for at least ten years and then have a reasonable chance of getting a tenured job in third level or direct research in industry. All of that is going by the board.

I repeat that it is extraordinary folly for the Government to impose cuts at third level of approximately 4% for all of the universities and the DIT - the Minister should look at the small print figures in the budget. Again, these are people who came back to Ireland full of hope. They were a flagship for us and letting them go is like letting go Waterford Glass and other iconic flagships, such as SR Technics, where 1,200 highly skilled people were let go due to complete ineptitude on the part of the Government, and Aer Lingus, given what is currently happening there. We need a serious revision of policy.

What is being proposed in the Bill, instead of creating a framework of hope, will actually blight areas. The areas that we all know went downhill seriously in the 1980s will now face even more blight. There are 2,500 local authority houses in the Dublin 15 area. People have been getting unemployment payments, and young people had been going on to college and staying on longer at school. With the kind of package announced in the budget, it appears we are going back to the future in terms of reservoirs of estates where the unemployment rate will once again become very high, particularly among young men. That is a calamity and a profound social mistake on the part of the Government.

See this speech in context