Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)

It gives me great pleasure to move this motion this evening. For the past few weeks politics has very much been dominated by personality politics. We have had the resignations of George Lee and Déirdre de Búrca, the resignation from Government of Deputy O'Dea and some hours ago, with great regret, the resignation of Deputy Sargent as Minister of State. However, politics is not about personalities and individuals or at least it should not be. Politics is about the 4.5 million citizens of this country. This evening in particular we wish to focus on the 437,000 people on the live register and the approximately 85,000 young people who are signing on. The purpose of this motion is to highlight the seriousness of the situation and to put forward some of Fine Gael's positive ideas to help alleviate this young person's recession.

This is a young person's recession. Certainly everyone in every sector has taken a hit, but those who are most exposed in this recession are young people. They are the ones most likely to be out of work and most likely to have to emigrate. They are the ones, who if they are in work, are the most likely to be on temporary contracts without protection or pension provision. They are the ones most likely to be burdened by heavy debts, mortgages and for the first time since 1930 the spectre of debt deflation and ever rising debt repayments taking up an ever-shrinking income. With tonight's motion I want to speak to them.

The motion highlights the seriousness of the situation. While it is true that we are facing an international recession and that other countries are also suffering, in the space of two years Ireland has gone from a country of relatively low unemployment to a country that has the second highest unemployment in the eurozone, regardless of how it is measured. It is a very serious situation which should not be treated lightly. Some 12.7% of the adult population are unemployed with another 7% claiming disability allowance and another 4% or 5% receiving the one-parent family payment. That means that more than 20% of our population of working age are now not working and are dependent on social welfare for their income. That is not sustainable or desirable. It has major economic consequences in that the country is borrowing money to pay for social welfare. It also has major social consequences because people who end up on welfare for more than six months or a year very often stay on welfare for the rest of their lives, stuck in a relative-poverty trap, and nobody wants that.

We are making a number of proposals this evening. Fine Gael is proposing a national internship programme to be targeted at very many graduates who cannot find employment, including young nurses, physiotherapists, architects and other graduates. We want the Minister to make available some of the places in the public service that have been left vacant because of the recruitment ban to allow young graduates to work in those positions for 20 hours a week, receiving the full entry rate in those employments and not the social welfare rate as is the case with work placement programme. They should also receive a small bursary with which they can in the other 20 hours study for a higher degree, diploma or masters. This is not anything like the Government's work placement programme. It is a serious proposal to give people real experience and allow them to train at the same time. It is not essentially free labour, which is what the Government is offering with the WPP.

We also want second-chance education. Quite cheaply we can provide 10,000 additional places for people to re-enter education. There are very many people, particularly young construction workers, who left school early to do apprenticeships or just to take up work in construction. They got paid very well during the boom years - perhaps as much as €2,000 a week - but now find themselves out of work and with no qualifications suitable to the current environment and no prospect of ever earning a good income again. We need to help them to go back to school. It should not be just for eight or nine months as is the case with the back to education allowance, but a serious programme to allow them to go back to school for two years to do their leaving certificate examinations and then enter college. They should be paid to do so for that two-year period, covering the summer period also and not just the eight months provided for in the back to education scheme.

We call on the Government to create an apprenticeship guarantee. Some 7,000 apprentices are in between stages now and cannot get beyond the work experience they need. A model exists - the community youth training programme that was used in the 1980s to take on apprentices who were in exactly the same position as they are now. We need to take on apprentices to build community centres and schools, and do public works. People can go around the country now and see community centres with the small FÁS logo on them. They were built in the 1980s when a Government at that time thought it appropriate to take on unemployed apprentices to allow them at the very least to finish their training. We are calling on the Government to do that this evening.

We also call on the Government to expand the CE schemes, which used to employ 44,000 but have now been cut to 22,000. They could be brought back to 27,000 with relative ease and minimal expense.

We also call on the Government to introduce a work share arrangement, the kurzarbeit geld system, as is used in Germany or work-share as used in Rhode Island in the United States. For example, an employer of 100 employees instead of laying off 10 employees would be allowed to keep them all on but put 20 of them on short time and the Government would subsidise the difference. This can be only a temporary measure and cannot work forever. For employers facing a cyclical downturn or a temporary blip in sales orders, this kind of mechanism could save many jobs. In Germany at the moment it is saving 500,000 jobs. We believe in Ireland it could save between 10,000 and 15,000 and would be a much more effective measure than the Government's current temporary employment subsidy scheme.

We also ask the Government to cut the tax on jobs - employer's PRSI. An employer hiring somebody must pay a 10% tax for doing so. It costs an employer at least €220 a week for an employee earning €200. We are asking the Government to reduce employer's PRSI not just for people coming off the dole, but to reduce it across the board. The cost of employing people needs to be reduced so as to stop taxation on employment as the Government is doing now and to use the proceeds of the carbon tax to offset this. The ESRI estimates, in the event, that this could create more than 30,000 jobs over two years.

We are also asking the Tánaiste to give serious consideration to Fine Gael's NewERA plan. There is a considerable amount of money to be tapped into, such as hedge funds, pension funds etc. Many people have money in savings and we need to get that money invested in the economy. NewERA is our vehicle for doing exactly that. Essentially, it means using the semi-States, privatising some of them and using that revenue as well as taking some revenue from the pension funds - retooling and rebuilding the semi-States to allow them to invest in the economy, to build broadband, invest in alternative energy and use them as the engines for growth. It is a matter of bringing the private capital that is available back into the economy and investing for the future.

Finally, I wish to address the Government's counter motion, which is disappointing. It is self-congratulatory, there are no new ideas in it and no new measures. There is no hope in the counter motion tabled by the Tánaiste. We are not going to play personality politics, however, and this is a serious issue. We have highlighted the problem and put forward eight solutions we believe are viable. We humbly ask her, if she is serious about unemployment and really cares about the 85,000 young people who are unemployed, to withdraw her counter motion, to come behind us and not divide the House. I ask the Tánaiste, the Fianna Fáil backbenchers, the Green Party and the Independents not to divide the House and support the positive motion we have put forward.

See this speech in context