Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Does the Taoiseach agree that one of the great ironies of the present age is that older citizens are required to work longer simply to make ends meet because half the population do not have any pension provision, while the other half who thought they were the lucky ones have found out that they are not lucky at all after paying tens of thousands of euro into schemes that will be worth nothing? On the other side of the equation, young people across Europe are lying idle. A wasted generation remains unemployed, even at a time when much work needs to be done. It is an indictment of neoliberal capitalism that the youth unemployment rate stands at 50% in a number of countries in Europe. The average rate is 25% and in Ireland one in every three young people is unemployed. That figure would be one in two if the rest of them had not been driven out of the country, leaving their families and communities behind.

By anybody's reckoning, this is a crisis and an emergency. Where is the emergency response? Last week the Taoiseach and his colleagues lauded a €6 billion initiative to tackle youth unemployment. Will this be their European legacy? We wondered whether it was an escapade into black humour. It is proposed to spend €6 billion over seven years for more than 7 million unemployed young people. That works out at less than €1,000 per person and less than €150 per person per year. It would not even pay for one day of a FÁS course. Everybody knows some of our bankers can pull larger amounts out of lower parts of their anatomy in one go. If that was not insulting enough, the Government decided in the same gesture to allocate a sum ten times that amount for the banks. In effect, it is stating the banks are ten times more important than Europe's young people. The banks have already received €1 trillion at nominal interest rates from the ECB. Imagine what could have done with this money if it had been invested in a programme of public works to improve the physical and social infrastructure of Europe. Instead of introducing schemes for water meters or bullying homeowners, the Government could have repaired the water system. Why does the Government continue to promote policies that condemn young people to a lost generation? Will the Taoiseach assure us that he will not listen to the lunacy of the ESRI and will abandon austerity? Despite all he has said, austerity, clearly, is not working.

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