Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I move:

"That Dáil Éireann, noting with concern that since the Taoiseach took office:

the number of people on the live register has more than doubled bringing the total number on the live register to a record 466,923;

over 100,000 people have emigrated;

GNP has declined by 20% and the Irish recession has been deeper and longer than that of any other EU country;

Irish borrowing costs have increased dramatically, reflecting the growing lack of international confidence in Ireland's economic strategy; and

the Government has failed to present a coherent jobs strategy;

calls on the Government to steer Ireland away from economic disaster by putting jobs at the centre of a new confidence-building economic strategy, in particular by:

using the National Pensions Reserve Fund, private pension funds and sales of nonstrategic State assets to accelerate the investments in high speed broadband, clean energy and water needed to make Ireland a better place to do business and to create jobs;

cutting employers' PRSI rates for the low paid;

scrapping the travel tax and reducing airport charges as part of a deal with the airline industry to expand services and increase tourist numbers;

providing partial loan guarantees for small and medium sized enterprises;

publishing an action plan for implementing the recommendations of the National Competitiveness Council and the Competition Authority in order to drive down costs in the economy;

slashing unnecessary red tape for small businesses;

providing second chance education and traineeship positions for unemployed young people; and

encouraging entrepreneurship by overhauling our outdated bankruptcy laws."

The Leas-Cheann Comhairle knows as well as any Member that we face an appalling jobs crisis. In the space of the last two years, we have lost a quarter of a million jobs and this decline has not yet halted. As more than 80% of those who have lost their jobs are under the age of 30, this constitutes a really serious blow to our young labour force. Moreover, recent days have witnessed the huge emergence of emigration as a factor affecting Irish people. The emigration level of young Irish people has doubled in the last two years. It shortly will be the equivalent of the entire cohort of young people coming out of school and college leaving the country each year. These are the people who have been abandoned by the lack of an effective employment strategy from the Government. These are the very people who we should be nurturing because they will be the building blocks of the economic recovery we must build. Instead, they will be building the economic futures of Australia, Canada and other far-flung places. This represents an enormous challenge to this State.

I do not pretend that Ireland does not have huge fiscal and banking crises that threaten our very economic survival as they undoubtedly exist. However, if we view the solving of those two problems as being the goals of policy, we shall fail. The goal of policy must be about fixing people's lives and what has gone wrong with the lives of those who have been so disrupted by this crisis. The banking and fiscal problems are real and are constraints on what we can do about the challenges to fix people's lives. However, they are not the goal of policy. While people will recognise that they are real constraints, they do not render us powerless. Sadly, however, that has been the feature of Government thinking with regard to the jobs crisis. It has felt itself to be powerless and is obsessed with dealing with the banking and fiscal problems and has not yet focused on the need for a job strategy, which is the only key that will bring together all those problems with some chance of success.

Had the Government adopted the budgetary approach put forward by Fine Gael last year, which was fully compliant with the €4 billion in savings that needed to be made according to the agreement with the European Union, 50,000 more people would now be gainfully occupied in this economy than is the case at present. This would be a highly significant change and boost to confidence. More than 10,000 of them would be engaged in laying out infrastructures such as a smart electricity grid, a decent water system or decent broadband. Another 10,000 would still be with the employers who otherwise would have let them go because of the work sharing proposals that Fine Gael proposed to stop employers from thinking of redundancy as the first option in a recession. Another 10,000 would be recruits as a result of cutting the labour costs arising from the PRSI system associated with taking on an employee by 3% and a further 20,000 would have been young people engaged in work experience or re-skilling. All of the proposals were possible to implement and we fitted them within the budgetary constraints. It is not that we are powerless to address these problems but simply that the Government's priorities have lain elsewhere. I am not pretending either that the choices we made are easy. They require forcing changes in the way we manage the money we have at our disposal. They would not be comfortable for people who are quite cosy with the existing arrangements but unfortunately the world has changed dramatically and we must change with it. The Government has failed to recognise that unless it has a credible job strategy, all the rest of its efforts will be set at nought.

As a community, we really do have big choices to make. They will determine whether we create a successful future or we will spend all our time trying to shore up the mistakes of the past. The tragedy of economic policy in the past 18 months to two years is that it has been all about trying to nurse along the failures of the past instead of trying to create a better future with employment creation.

In the banking crisis, the policy has essentially been all about nursing along the bad loans of the past and, in the process, starving new businesses of credit. All recruitment to the public service has been stopped but the Government has not reformed existing work practices. The Government has shied away from doing so. We have raised taxes and cut pay but we have not streamlined the very system of government itself, which represents the future. We have slashed investment in infrastructure at the very time when it is required. We are told time and again by the National Competitiveness Council that the core problems are that broadband is not adequate and that electricity and waste disposal are too expensive. The list goes on. All the problems are key infrastructure problems.

We have cut the rate of social welfare but we have not removed the traps that stop people from fulfilling their potential. Now is the time in which we must radically reform the way we proceed in order to give Ireland a chance of creating employment for its people. The problem is that we will be abandoning the new generation if we continue to pursue policies that are about battening down the hatches, pulling up the ladder behind us and letting the outsiders survive on their own. Unfortunately, those who are being left outside to bear the full brunt of the storm are the young people who are so important to our future.

I do not want to be in the business of knocking anybody's ideas but I believe the strategy document, which is another version of the document on the smart economy, is appalling. It represents a cobbling together of existing targets from different sources that we have seen already. It was a cynical exercise. There is not one new policy or initiative announced in the document. It was a matter of doctoring targets to give a press release. There is nothing that would change the policy that has already been adopted; that is the tragedy. It is all about continuity in respect of what everyone was doing before. No person in any agency will wake up tomorrow morning and say he or she will do something different because of the publication of the strategy statement. Nothing has changed. That should not be the case.

It is not a case of business as usual. Solving the jobs crisis is not just a matter of continuing to let the agencies do what they were always doing. The problem does not lie with the agencies. Ministers, who are at the core and responsible for most of the developments that are holding back our jobs success, will not square up to the problem and take responsibility for it themselves. One example is that Ministers have said they would cut €500 million off the unnecessary compliance cost for business. That is €500 million that businesses could do with. To date, after three years of supposedly pursuing that objective, the Government has cut €20 million. Less than 4% of the target has been achieved in three years. Who is taking responsibility? Whose job is on the line in the Cabinet because of the 95% failure to meet the targets set by the Government? The reality is that none is on the line. No Minister feels under threat because he is failing to deliver something that was promised time and again to businesspeople who are trying to create employment.

The same could be said of implementing the recommendations of the Competition Authority. Some 50% of them have been ignored. Last year it was promised there would be a mechanism for ensuring they would be implemented. This has not been honoured. Costs in areas of key infrastructure were to be lowered. That was a core message from the National Competitiveness Council, but nothing has been done about it. We were to see a response to the small business credit problem but, as yet, there is none. The strategy statement is silent on all these issues. It is silent on infrastructure, credit flow, the excessive costs of Government services, barriers to entry to business and virtually everything the National Competitiveness Council has told us time and again is holding back progress.

The tragedy is that the Government wants to create an illusion that it is doing something. What it has done is set up another committee. That is the essence of the strategy that was launched yesterday. This is simply not good enough. We face enormous handicaps and the solutions to those were given to the Government as long ago as 2007 in the recommendations of the National Competitiveness Council. The council raised all the key issues, including those associated with waste policy, interconnection on the electricity grid, e-Government, public service reform, quango reviews, the payment of bonuses to people who did not deliver results, the reform of the regulatory system and the promotion of competition. The council referred to virtually all the key initiatives that would make employment easier to create. The recommendations were put on the Government's desk in 2007 when it took up office but none has been addressed. That is why we do not have an effective employment strategy. Governments will not take responsibility for what they have been directly charged with doing.

See this speech in context