Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I thank the Deputy for her question but, unfortunately, I must remind her that this country has lost its economic sovereignty. We are not in business as usual and when it was business as usual it was mad business. The construction sector to which she referred represented 25% of economic activity in the Republic. That was twice the normal requirement in a growing economy. As an adjunct to that the banking sector grew exponentially in a manner of which all Members are aware. It must be scaled down and it is scaling down but that comes at a cost such as the kind of unemployment and redundancies to which Deputy McDonald referred and to which I referred in my replies to Deputy Ó Cuív.

In this instance, for those people who have skill sets we hope to be able to enhance them and reorientate them towards areas where there are jobs. Sadly, from my point of view as Minister for Education and Skills, many of the young men or young boys - because they were 16, 17 and 18 - who were lured out of the education system into highly paid and lucrative jobs at the height of the boom now find themselves at 19 and 20 years of age with poor sets of skills which will require re-entry into the education sector and the vocational education sector to acquire a new set of skills which, sadly, they did not have the opportunity to achieve while they were in school.

We must work to a programme of recovery. We are 14 months into the programme of recovery that was negotiated initially by the previous Administration which in its entirety will take 36 months. We have 20 months left of having to negotiate with and obtain money from the troika, who are in town at the moment. We will do everything we can to stave off the increases in unemployment. The good news - although it is not good news - is that the level of unemployment seems to have plateaued, yet within those figures of 400,000, more than 120,000 people got jobs in the past year. There is a churn within the labour market. People are getting jobs and losing jobs but the scale of unemployment and the rapid increase in unemployment has now, fortunately, tailed off. Some of it - in anticipation of the Deputy's reply - is due to emigration, which we deeply regret. The Government is intent on recovering the economic sovereignty of this Republic which was shattered by the previous Administration. One of the things that shattered it was the bank guarantee to which Deputy McDonald's party signed up with some enthusiasm.

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