Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

With regard to the questions of Deputies Ó Snodaigh and O'Dea, all the funding amounts must be finalised. In general, the funds would be within the envelope of European social funds and cohesion funds. I cannot give the Deputies a final figure except to say that President Von Rompuy's indicative figure was €6 billion, €3 billion of which was in the context of current resources and €3 billion of which was additional. However, I am conscious of the fact that President Von Rompuy must finalise and negotiate that with the European Parliament. The European Parliament, including parties and groups throughout it, has been extremely supportive of the development of a youth guarantee. When will it start? Assuming that all goes well, it will start when the next budgetary period starts, namely, the beginning of 2014. It will be necessary, therefore, to examine how it affects different countries. Consider the suggestions being made.

For countries with a youth unemployment rate of over 25%, which includes Ireland, some of the spending and activities would be front-loaded because, to take up Deputy Wallace's point, when we have a depressed economy, apprenticeships are an important area for youth training and education. Those schemes,however, have fallen on lean times because of the collapse in construction. We are talking about building a framework to help as many young people as possible to get education and training.

In Finland and Sweden when banks collapsed, during the following period, the Governments invested in education and training, which paid enormous dividends when their economies recovered.

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