Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Unfortunately for Deputy Higgins, core payment rates in social protection have been protected. In the recent budget, the Minister for Finance provided €500 million in incentives for small businesses to improve and develop opportunities to take on extra staff.

Today the Minister for Education and Skills attended the first meeting of SOLAS, which replaces FÁS. I like to think we can engage in a very different way with young people. That is why incentives have been put in place specifically for unemployed young people who might want to start their own businesses. They will have the opportunity to claim back up to €40,000 in income tax paid in previous years. It is also important to ask what the economy will be built on in the future. It will be built on small and medium-sized enterprises. It is a lot easier to have 50 small firms take on 20 extra staff apiece than to continuously attempt to land big companies with 1,000 jobs, welcome though they are. In that sense, the budget was unashamedly focused on the opportunity for job creation. Those young people about whom Deputy Higgins rightly speaks deserve to be engaged with properly and not just seen as a statistic on the live register. We should not just say to them, "Come in and sign for your dole and then go away." It is different now because there is an engagement with them. They are asked what is their experience, what it is they would like to do, what course they would like to follow-----

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