Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We move on through the depressing list of targets set in this really ruthless Bill. We have already dealt with women who are having children, people who are burying their dead and those who are injured or become sick at work. Now we are moving on to young people. The Minister laughably tries to justify this measure with references to labour activation. I am sure she is aware that the real activation for young people is to leave the country. The fact that they are leaving certainly shows they are not sitting at home in front of plasma-screen TVs, lazing about the place waiting for someone to offer them employment, or living in luxury - as the Minister might see it - on social welfare payments. These individuals are leaving because they are energetic, educated and dynamic and there is nothing here for them. How much more dynamic and energetic does the Minister want them to be? They want jobs, but what she is doing is attacking their incomes and providing them with lots of fake jobs.

It is important to place on record the fact that officials from the Department of Finance came before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform and highlighted an anomaly in the Government's figures. This anomaly relates to an apparent drop in unemployment and a slight rise in employment in circumstances in which no corresponding economic growth had occurred. The officials could not explain the reason for this, but there is an explanation, namely, that everybody is leaving the country and that the so-called jobs that are being created are not real jobs. People are paid virtually nothing when they take up these jobs but they are still classed as no longer being unemployed. The officials stated that the surveys carried out by the CSO ask people whether they are employed or unemployed. If someone is on a Tús, JobBridge or JobsPlus scheme or if he or she is involved with the Government's new brainchild, the Gateway project - which is a disgrace - under which people on social welfare payments will be given an additional €20 per week to do council workers' jobs, thereby essentially doing away with real jobs, he or she will be classed as being employed but there will be no corresponding growth in GDP because the person is not actually contributing to the economy but is in a fake job. Such jobs do not give rise to growth.

This explains the anomaly pointed out by the Department of Finance. We need real jobs. They can happen only with investment, not by taking money from people, which is an attack on them and on their spending power and in turn damages the economy. We need real investment to create jobs. That could be done by taxing wealth instead of attacking young people, as many on this side of the House have said time and again. It is a disgrace that the Minister is making this attack on young people.

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