Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

If one watches any popular television series based on areas where young people are unemployed, such as "The Wire" in Baltimore or "Boys from the Black Stuff" one can see the effect of long-term male unemployment. It scars young men, not just for a few years but for decades. Professor Blanchflower is a world authority on this and was a member of the Bank of England monetary committee. He is a respected international economist and that is what he said when he came to Dublin. We cannot afford to have all these young men semi-permanently unemployed with nothing to do and nothing to look forward to, except a few bob a week on the dole. That is not a career or life-enhancing path.

Cowen economics seems to be all about dishing out pain to individuals and families. Fianna Fáil has destroyed the economy. The Labour Party's strategic investment bank will help to put people back to work before it is too late. Everyone knows that tough medicine is needed to close Fianna Fáil's fiscal deficit, but we also need to give people hope by investing in our future, and that is the what the Labour Party's strategic investment bank is all about.

In order to keep my sanity with the deluge of bad news which Fianna Fáil brings every other week to this Chamber and the country about the banks, I make a positive point of going to visit multinationals companies and innovative Irish companies and spend time with time discussing what actually works. I had an opportunity recently to talk to companies like IBM and Microsoft and attended Craig Barrett's lecture in Dublin on innovation and employment growth in Ireland. All of these companies have one thing in common, namely, they are not credit starved because they can borrow on the international credit markets. They are not dependent on our frozen Irish banks.

That is why Paul Krugman, writing in March, discussed how Ireland should not become an example for the United States. I know the little Fianna Fáil book has many quotes from people who say it is wonderful, but Paul Krugman and Simon Jenkins, the former senior economist for the World Bank, have pointed out that the difficulty with Ireland's remedies is that while they may rescue the banks they are driving the rest of country down. That is what the Labour Party motion is trying to address tonight.

Craig Barrett, in his lecture in the Mansion House a number of months ago, spoke about the talents and skills of young Irish people, in particular well qualified engineers in IT and science. In the United States and India such people are those who establish start-ups, in terms of new business and innovation. Our strategic investment bank would not simply concentrate on public investment in needed infrastructure, but would also concentrate on the gap which people like Craig Barrett, who know a thing or two about this, have identified as a key gap we have compared to other economies which have a lot of bright young people, such as India which is devoted to education.

While such countries are providing for start-ups we, because of what is happening with the banks and the Government's obsession with them, do not have the money to devote to that. The Labour Party proposal is to provide key funds for innovative start-ups to put us back in the game, not just via multinationals but via Irish small and medium enterprises. Over the past 20 years we have built up, mainly through our third level colleges, considerable experience in how to do that. but we need funding and capital for such start-ups.

At the Microsoft presentation, which the Taoiseach attended, the key message which many of the young innovators, scientists, engineer and IT people conveyed to me was that they can build the jobs if they can get the capital. All I can say is that if Fianna Fáil, as long as it is in government, some of the Labour Party's ideas there might be a chance it could return some hope to the country. Instead, to return to what Matt Taibbi, an American writer said, the Government seems to be concentrating exclusively on the great vampire squid that is sucking the lifeblood out of this economy, that is, the failed banks such as Irish Nationwide and Anglo Irish Bank. The Government should move away from that and give hope to our young people. If they cannot do it, they should move over, have a general election and we will do it for them.

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