Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

On behalf of the Government, I thank Deputy O'Dea for the observations he made, which we welcome. We will probably have information about the bond auction before the end of business, and if I receive the information, I will convey it to the House. These figures are disappointing. The Government views unemployment as its number one priority and we believe these figures are far too high. We have succeeded in stabilising the live register. This is the 18th successive month of broad stability. The live register for each month has been within 3% of the figure for the same month in the previous year. It is also important to remember that there are always people coming onto and off the live register. For example, 62,000 people left the live register to take up work in the first five months of this year.

We all want to get the numbers down and the Government is sparing no effort to do everything it can to achieve this. When we first came into office we successfully negotiated the jobs initiative. We put in place the job strategy and we are ensuring it is being implemented across all Departments and agencies. We designed the budget to be jobs friendly and we included a number of employment promoting measures in it. We published Pathways to Work, a major reform of the education, training and social welfare system to ensure people are assisted in finding employment. We are working to bring forward an investment programme to stimulate activity in the domestic economy.

In addition to those observations, and I can make more, we export 80% of what we produce. All the schemes in the world, while they will assist people to upskill, will not provide them with jobs unless the economy grows. We are the most export dependent economy in the European Union and we export 80% of what we produce. Although last week's announcements have stabilised the market considerably, the continuing uncertainty in the euro means we will depend to a certain extent on factors over which we have no control. These include the buoyancy in the European market. By extension, because of the downturn in the European market, there has been a downturn in China, the United States and elsewhere. We will continue to improve the qualifications of people in the labour market but we depend on economic growth. It is to be hoped, as broadly anticipated, the ECB will announce a reduction in interest rates later today, which will be a further stimulus for broad economic growth.

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