Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

This Government was elected with a mandate to sort out the country's extremely difficult fiscal and banking crises. I do not believe anybody expects that will be done in an incredibly rapid period. Rather it will be a piece of work whereby actions are taken across a series of different fronts, with the aim of getting people and business back to work. That is the critical issue. Although the measures announced on Tuesday are relatively modest and were presented by the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, in a modest fashion, the hubristic presentations of the Celtic tiger years would not be appropriate. The initiative will be judged by its outcome which will take some time to work through.

Across a range of Departments where Government has influence over spending, the Government will direct spending in a way that will help to create employment, specifically in shovel-ready projects and those that are localised and relatively small in scale. That will be a way of ensuring the spend goes into the economy. Equally, the reduction in VAT on tourism services and other services such as hairdressing relates to services which are provided at a local level throughout the country and are not concentrated in one specific sector, area or city region such as Dublin. This will have the greatest possibility of producing jobs at a local level, one consequence of which should be assistance to consumer confidence. No modern economy runs without consumer confidence in spending. All of us know that although many people have lost employment or have had enormous reductions in their income and take home pay, equally there are people who have a spending capacity but who, by and large, are nervous and frightened of spending, for all the reasons we know.

The Government is serious about helping people to get back to work. This is what joined-up Government looks like - measures to help job creation together with measures to help people who take advantage of these jobs, which is where the training places will apply. I will make some points on that issue and on the role of my Department in the national internship programme. This is a different type of recession and the skills needs of those who find themselves unemployed are widely varied. There are tens of thousands of people from the construction industry who did much hard work and made good earnings during the high years of the Celtic tiger but many of them have relatively low education levels.

There are two areas which had gaps in provision and these are addressed in this package. People who already have a degree or diploma who want to do a Masters or to requalify to do something else can do so and retain their social welfare payments through the springboard, part-time, third level programme. In Germany, for example, every time there is a recession and workers go on short-term the balance of their time is made up by investing in quality training and skills development.

The second part of our programme is internships for people, which in the main is targeted at and, I suspect, will be largely taken up by those people who have come out of college relatively recently or who have finished their apprenticeship and served their time. They need a foot in the door. The national internship programme is a way of breaking the cycle in which one cannot get a job without experience and cannot get experience without a job. For many people who have qualified in recent years, either as apprentices or as graduates, this is a Catch-22. Employers will not look at one unless one has the magic of experience; equally one cannot get experience unless one has some kind of placement or job. This is one way, therefore, of giving valuable experience, the foot in the door, the start on the ladder, to people who have qualifications but have not been able to exercise them in the current very depressed jobs market. It is also a way of stemming the brain drain and keeping this young talent in Ireland, at least for some time. Most people in this situation have already been thinking about, if not actually applying for, emigrating for a period. Nobody has a difficulty with any person from Ireland going and living abroad for a few years. I went abroad and worked in Africa for three years during the 1980s. Many people in this Chamber have gone abroad, worked and got valuable experience abroad before returning home. That is what we hope will happen to those who go abroad nowadays. Equally, however, there are people who do not have that option and those who simply cannot get their foot in the doorway of jobs experience.

We expect the private sector companies that will benefit from such talent and which have been specifically invited to support the national internship programme to step up to the plate and provide decent internship opportunities. We will call on companies, including those in the semi-State sector, to play their part together with the public sector and the voluntary and community sectors if they are interested in the internship scheme, as I hope they will be.

We are in a national emergency. Some 444,000 plus of our fellow men and women, citizens, are on the live register. Some 80,000 of the people on the live register are under 25 years of age. One half of those classified as unemployed are long-term unemployed. The increase of 20,000 training and internship places catering to different levels of skills and different needs is simply the beginning of a stepped up effort by the Government to help people back into employment or to prepare for new kinds of jobs. The internship scheme will provide 5,000 unemployed people with an internship opportunity ranging from six to nine months in an organisation in the private, public, community or voluntary sectors. This happens in other countries, especially in the United States of America and in the institutions of the European Union. Many people in the House will be familiar with the notion of internships or stagiaires in the European Union. These programmes provide a valuable opportunity for high-level graduates with high-level qualifications and people who have practical training to get work.

Participants in the national internship programme will continue to be paid social welfare payments as well as an additional payment, a top-up allowance of €50 per week, on top of their existing social welfare entitlement. The internship proposal serves to break the cycle of not being able to get into the jobs market in the current situation because of a lack of experience. One key benefit of the national internship scheme is that it will step in. The scheme will provide participants with a chance to prove that they have the necessary skills and commitment to make a valuable contribution to the work of an organisation. Many multinational companies which operate in Ireland already run such schemes, especially in their home countries. In some cases they run internship schemes in Ireland already. People from these companies have said to me and other members of Government that they are especially interested in supporting such an initiative.

I trust there will be widespread interest in this measure. Will it solve the whole financial crisis? No, it will not. However, as Mao said, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with one small step. The announcement by the Government this week is the beginning of an intensive focus on jobs, training and how to get people to have the skills they need to operate in the modern economy. Improving our skills basis will be one critical element in making Ireland more competitive.

The national internship scheme will go live on 1 July. It will be supported by appropriate information and websites for sponsors and people who wish to apply for the scheme. I am confident there will be strong interest in it.

We will evaluate the scheme to determine what the experience has been. I was very pleased that there were 5,000 places on the Tús scheme but I was somewhat shocked to find out when I came to the Department that, some four or five months after the scheme had been launched and advertised, there was no one on it. The critical thing in all these initiatives announced by Government is to ensure that from the announcement we move to implementation and take up. I am confident that there will be more than 1,000 people on Tús by the end of June. Once the internship scheme begins in July I am confident there will be a significant pick-up in a relatively short period.

See this speech in context