Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I thank all of those who participated in this debate, both on my own benches and on the Labour Party benches, and, indeed, on the Fianna Fáil benches - the Minister, Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív, adopted a particularly constructive approach.

I do not doubt the Minister of State, Deputy Billy Kelleher's sincerity in addressing the issue of employment because we are facing a horrendous crisis. However, I would say to him and to the Government that if they keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome, they are simply fooling themselves. That is the problem with this Government. It keeps doing the same thing in the case of banks and the public finances and ignoring the wider competitiveness agenda.

I was alarmed at the smugness of the Minister, Deputy Batt O'Keeffe, when he spoke last night. He suggested that the Government had everything under control. It was bizarre. I do not know whether he read the National Competitive Council report, which is hot off the press. It listed 36 areas in the red zone where Ireland was seriously uncompetitive and damaging job prospects. Twenty of those were directly within the responsibility of Ministers and we had the Minister trotting in here like a two year old pretending that all of these matters were under control.

The public, not to mention the markets, were stunned at the naivety of the Trading and Investing in a Smart Economy document. I do not envy the Minister of State, Deputy Kelleher, the task of chairing a group that will look at the implementation of this because I have never seen such a vacuous set of proposals emerge from any Department. It contained measures such as monitoring international media reports of Ireland. It raised the issue of air access to the country but never mentioned the travel tax. It is a bizarre document.

This was supposed to be a jobs document and it was glossed up with 300,000 jobs. There is not a single commitment to cut the cost of any area of Government. There is not a single initiative on credit. There is not a single initiative on the €500 million in compliance costs that are unnecessarily paid by business, according the Government itself. There is not a single new initiative on the roll-out of broadband - it simply rabbits what the Minister has already stated.

There is no initiative to tackle the chaos that reigns in both waste and water policy, which has been highlighted time and again to the Government by the National Competitiveness Council and by Forfás. They highlighted the approach that the Minister is taking to waste management, the total lack of regulatory fairness in the way waste management is handled in this country and the chaos in the case of water. There is not a single initiative in those areas.

There is no commitment to link research and development to employment, which is a core recommendation to try to upgrade the skill base and product development. There is no mention of the need to address that aspect.

There is no initiative on specific bottlenecks which, as Deputy Clune correctly stated, were highlighted in the interesting report, Making it Happen. These are bottlenecks that are holding back specific sectors, such as the medical devices sector, and include the difficulty of getting regulatory approvals from ethics committees that are chaotic and difficult to get through. There were many specific initiatives where the Government could have pledged, "We will remove that bottleneck. That is one thing we will remove and we will have it done in six months."

There was no commitment to enforce competition law. There have been umpteen reports about the need to reduce our costs in sheltered sectors where there are barriers to competition, but there is not a mention of it in the Government's great document that is supposed to create 300,000. This was simply an exercise in putting a bulldog clip around a whole lot of stuff that is there already and coming up with a big number to try to manage the media, not the economy.

I must say this to the Minister of State and it is a pity the Minister is not here - the stakes are too high to go on with that sort of political claptrap. These are commitments where a Government must say it will implement these changes. It will set out a roadmap, milestones and the date on which it expects these to be done. It will pin responsibility on someone and expect that to happen.

We cannot continue to preside over a situation where 80% of the job losses are affecting people under the age of 30. These people are vanishing. According to the figures this week, 30,000 Irish people emigrated last year. We are heading for 50,000, which would mean the entire cohort leaving our schools and colleges would be emigrating every year. If that happens, we will see our economy sacrifice and lose the core skills that we need to rebuild this country.

The employment crisis is the main crisis. Banking and fiscal policy are constraints on what we might do, but we are certainly not powerless and there are umpteen recommendations available to Government on which it need only commit and state it will do whatever it takes to get this done within a fixed timescale. That would be a jobs strategy. Then we would see Ministers putting their own reputations on the line and stating they will ensure that it happens.

However, that is not what any of these documents offer. That is not what the Minister offered when he came in here last night. That is why people are frustrated and upset. The real crisis for most families around the country - the loss of their young talented people - is simply not being taken seriously by Government.

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