Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I meet skilled and experienced people on a daily basis who, through no fault of their own, find themselves unemployed. In many cases, their self-worth has been crushed. I meet families who are struggling in extremely difficult situations, trying to pay the electricity and heating bills and keep the roof over their heads. I meet people who tell me, through their tears, about the children and grandchildren they have lost to Australia, Canada and elsewhere. It is certainly not my intention to talk down the economy, but the people in question must be represented in this Chamber.

We must face reality. In the two and a half years since the Government came to power 167,000 people have emigrated and 10,700 full-time jobs have been lost. The 3,800 new jobs created correlate exactly with the number of part-time posts. Unemployment has stabilised, but that process had already begun before the Government came to power. Some 30,000 workers have been under-employed during its tenure. At the same time, the results for the past two quarters show we are back in recession. The point I am trying to make is that despite the hollow ecosystem of initiatives and jobs, there is no focus on the real economy which is not growing. A myriad of businesses are hamstrung by an inability to access credit and paralysed by the lack of demand and low expectations in the economy. The issues over which the Minister has some control such as the availability of credit, utility costs and rental costs are not being properly addressed. There has been no effort whatsoever to stimulate the economy sufficiently to create jobs. We need a growth level of 2% for jobs to be created, but there is no growth.

See this speech in context