Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It is far too high. That is why during the course of Ireland's EU Presidency we led a proposal to tackle the issue of youth unemployment in this country and across Europe, and agreed proposals for a youth guarantee scheme. In addition to agreeing the proposals, we went on to provide European money for the scheme. The original proposal was that this would be dealt with over a seven year period leading up to 2020, which was far too long. The problem of youth unemployment is here and we must address it now. That is why we front-loaded EU funding to 2014 and 2015 in order to deal with it.

In addition, we have provided for a range of initiatives which are being taken by the Government across the education and training areas. Youth initiatives include the JobsPlus and JobBridge schemes, Intreo and Momentum. A range of such measures are aimed at getting young people into employment. We have reduced the eligibility for getting onto JobsPlus from 12 to six months. We have also provided for an additional intake of 1,500 young people on the JobBridge scheme. We have ensured that there are an extra 1,000 places on the Tús scheme and we have ring-fenced a minimum of 2,000 places in the various Department of Education and Skills training schemes. We have made funds available for young entrepreneurs via the micro-finance scheme. In total, the specific provisions across these headings in the 2014 budget come to €46 million.

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