Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)

I, and definitely the 450,000 or so unemployed persons in this State, eagerly awaited the publication of the jobs initiative the Minister, Deputy Noonan, delivered here on Tuesday. Others have already addressed whether it was good, bad or indifferent and I am of the view it is indifferent. As Sinn Féin's spokesperson on social protection, defending social welfare rates is only part of my job because what people on the dole ultimately want is a job. That is why I eagerly awaited the initiative. I am not saying I am indifferent to the jobs initiative but that it is indifferent because it will not deliver on the potential, as Deputy Crowe said, that people expected. It will not have any major effect on the jobs queue, those 450,000 or so people who want work, play a full role in our society, pay taxes and through those taxes contribute to the economic recovery.

Since the commencement of the recession my party has launched a number of job creation and retention proposals, one of the key ones being job retention given that day in day out we hear of more job losses. The jobs initiative announced does not have as much of a proposal to retain jobs as it should have other than in respect of one or two key areas. There are two key differences between the proposals put forward by my party and those announced by the Minister, Deputy Noonan. The first is that Sinn Féin recognises it will take a major investment to get people back to work while the Government would rather use Ireland's wealth to bail out European banks. The second major difference is that our proposals would create employment whereas the cost neutral jobs initiative announced does not create real employment.

Needless to say I am sorely disappointed with the Government's plan. There are 437,524 people on the live register and the Government in its proposals has come up with 21,000 new opportunities. That creates an opportunity, while welcome, for only 5% of jobseekers. We are not even talking about real opportunities or real full-time jobs. In the main they are educational or training opportunities. How many jobs will be shed in the same period? That is the big question.

Only a few days prior to the launch of the jobs initiative, the figures released by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, showed that 2,000 public sector jobs are being shed. What is the point in the Government funding educational opportunities while at the same time shrinking the job opportunities towards which people can move? Thousands of people will be laid off in the State banking sector, which is what it is now. An Post announced it will have fewer jobs by the end of this year and there will be increasingly fewer jobs in the retail industry because of the collapse of consumer demand and the continual austerity measures taken by the previous Government and endorsed to date by this Government.

I acknowledge the commitment in the jobs initiative to reinvigorate the national employment action plan, which is badly in need of an update as it is no longer fit to activate people in any significant numbers. However, effective activation measures are resource intensive and I fear the Government is not making the necessary investment to ensure people can and will go back to work. It takes money and staff to conduct the requisite interviews and meetings with jobseekers to map out and match each and every jobseeker's skills and experience properly with appropriate education, training and ultimately job opportunities.

Last month the Government made a commitment to the EU and IMF that it will reduce social expenditure year on year. In that context it is unlikely that even the very basics of activation will be provided for by the Government, never mind the more extensive supports that are required such as affordable child care which are no less vital to enable a person to transit from the dole queue to work.

There has been much discussion in the media and on the airwaves, in particular, around the jobs crisis. Time and again commentators are depicting social welfare as a disincentive to work. Never has there been a less appropriate time for that paradigm. Welfare is not a disincentive to work; the absence of a job is a disincentive. That said, a number of unemployment and poverty traps still remain and they must be addressed. However, the solution is not to cut the rates and the schemes, rather it is to ensure that work pays by allowing recipients to move into low paid employment in some cases or to increase their hours without fear of an immediate loss of all their protections. The Government recognises this and that is why the programme for Government committed to amend the 30-hour rule for rent supplement and mortgage interest supplements, but to date it has not presented that proposal to the House. Hopefully, it will be done in the very near future. However, I fear that the promise the Government made to the European Union and IMF indicates it will instead take a retrograde approach to the issue of social spending. It will make life intolerable for people on social welfare, the most insecure and the lowest paid and the black market will be incentivised.

The Government has committed to reducing social expenditure, which means that despite ever increasing dole queues and greater numbers depending on mortgage interest supplements, it has implicitly promised to make further cuts to social welfare schemes. There is no other logic to that commitment it gave to the IMF. Considering that the programme for Government commits to maintain welfare rates, the only alternative open to the Government is for it to introduce stealth cuts. First, eligibility rules will be tightened and, second, payments will be hit by this Government. The Fine Gael Party and the Labour Party will continue Fianna Fáil's approach to placing the burden of the economic recovery unfairly on those in our society who have the least.

The creation of new training and education opportunities is welcome but the Government has not produced any accompanying protections against exploitation in such situations where there will be worker displacement. If precautions are not taken, the 5,000 internships announced could easily coincide with a further 5,000 job losses or at least the deferment of what could otherwise have been new, full-time job opportunities.

I recently listened to an employer on Newstalk espousing the tired line that social welfare payments must be cut because they act as a disincentive but he subsequently went on to reveal that he has taken on an intern for six months and if that intern does well, there will be a job at the end of it. If a job exists the person should be employed in that job from day one rather than an employer getting six months of free labour from somebody. What does the Government intend to do to prevent that type of exploitation and employment displacement?

I am also concerned that there is a drift towards workfare because it is an increasing feature in some of our supposedly social protection schemes. For instance, I met a number of young people last week who are involved in an insulation course organised by FÁS. They were being told they had to work a 40-hour week for nothing more than €20 above their jobseeker's allowance. That is workfare. It is a scandal, and workers must be protected to ensure that type of activity does not continue.

I am also sceptical of a number of the training opportunities announced and already I have raised some of the issues I had with the Minister for Social Protection. Time will tell whether some of those are new. For instance, one of the training opportunities in our area is a post-leaving certificate course, a hairdressing course, but some of the people who applied this week were told that 25% of the places on the course only were available to those who were leaving school this year and that the remainder was being ring-fenced for those over 25 who were on the dole. That is not the purpose of the post-leaving certificate courses and if that were to be the practice it would be a scandal because it would represent displacement of opportunities for those leaving school.

See this speech in context