Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the tenor in which he made his contribution. I acknowledge that the latest quarterly national household survey, QNHS, figures show an increase in unemployment, but we never said recovery would be fast or easy.

The Government inherited a jobs market in free fall with more than 250,000 private sector jobs lost in the three years before we took office. That is not a political charge; it is a fact.

At the peak of the boom, almost 24% of GNP was attributable to construction, 12% of total employment. The economy is in transition and since assuming office, we have delivered on the plan to build a new economy. Part of this is supporting a transition from the old failed economy based on property, banking and debt to a new sustainable economy based on enterprise, exports and innovation. The Cabinet sub-committee on economic recovery and jobs, through the action plan for jobs, has direct identifiable targets that are addressed directly with the Taoiseach on a regular basis using that reporting mechanism. Part of that process involves the small business advisory group, which includes all of stakeholders, such as ISME and IBEC. They are part of the process of getting the recovery we so badly need.

Deputy Calleary mentioned the skills shortage. There is a constant engagement with industry. I met with Google the day before yesterday to see how we could get a further engagement with such companies on the STEM area and that will directly feed into how we address the skills shortage. There are already programmes in play in terms of bridging courses but we must ensure there is a longer term policy goal that ensures we have a throughput of students from secondary into tertiary who are actively engaged in the STEM agenda, through courses such as Project Maths, so the right sort of software engineers and ICT graduates exist for the skills pool needed to sustain the economy in the longer term.

Unfortunately, as part of the necessary transition, jobs continue to be lost in construction, banking and the public sector as these sectors return to more realistic levels. While the headline numbers out of work have risen in the latest returns, the CSO data show that, on a seasonally adjusted basis, there was a quarterly decrease of 3,700 in the number of persons unemployed in quarter two compared to quarter one, from 312,000 to 309,000.

We are in a period of transformation of the public sector as a necessary step to managing our public finances in a better way. The number of employees in the public sector has declined by 25,800 or 6.3% in the year to June 2012 while the number of employees in the private sector decreased by 0.3% over the same period. This is an improvement on the decrease of 2.2% in those employed in the private sector in the previous year.

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