Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Some say we have a problem with unemployment in this country. In reality, we have a jobs and training crisis, a crisis which, since 2011, has resulted in approximately 150,000 young people in their 20s leaving Ireland for a decent job, a decent wage and a decent life somewhere else. They seek these needs as they are the right of everyone and are the most basic goals that we all strive to attain, but they seek them elsewhere because they are denied them in their homeland. They are cruelly denied these basic needs, first, due to the economic collapse of this State presided over by Fianna Fáil with tacit support from Fine Gael; second, because Fine Gael and the Labour Party in government have worked to stay the course of austerity started by Fianna Fáil with the bailout; and, most crucially, because they are seen as expendable and the Government has for the past two and half years been more interested in meeting bailout targets than investing in young people and their future.

Young people have been hit repeatedly by austerity. They never voted for the Governments that gave us an unstable, unequal boom and an inevitable, crushing bust, and they never cheered for the kinds of policy that landed us here, yet they are so harshly made to pay the price. Not only have they been treated harshly, they have been insulted most despicably by the Labour Party Ministers who treat them as lazy, feckless leeches who would rather watch daytime television and live on a pittance than work for a decent wage. The truth is that our young people are working, but they do so in London, Sydney, Liverpool, Melbourne and Toronto. The truth is that our young people want training, but they want it to be accessible and useful. They want it to lead them somewhere.

Young people are not stupid and they are rightly insulted by dead-end courses or dole cuts being offered while third-level fees go up and up. It sickens me to think that those who want to work and want to make their way in life are painted as lazy if they have the wit to turn their nose up at the yellow-pack rubbish such as JobBridge. Of course the Minister can wheel out the odd person who has gained real, valuable experience and ended up getting a job, but for every one of those there are hundreds of unpaid internships as potato-peelers and farm hands. In a short glance at JobBridge today I found these examples of supposed opportunities, although maybe someone will be lucky enough to get a "scam-bridge" internship within the Labour Party, gaining valuable experience in how to sell out 400,000 voters and most of one's backbenchers for a few ministerial seats.

However, worse than all of this are the positions that require qualifications that are clear signifiers of existing experience. These are the proof, if any was needed, that Deputy English was correct when he stated that JobBridge was "free labour". They also show that it is a tool for displacing workers and driving down wages in the long term. The opportunities have included positions as a school principal's assistant and clerical officers in the HSE. Is it any wonder that the chair of the JobBridge steering group, the interestingly named Mr. Martin Murphy, looked for an intern in his company? I wonder whether this intern will get paid employment at the company. This might be a novel ideal for Fine Gael, but surely I am not being naive to think that some Labour Party TDs still believe that people should be paid for work. As my constituency colleague, Deputy Lyons, stated, "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys." That is the reality of what a youth guarantee is about for the Government. Given the meagre sum being put towards this initiative, it is clear to most that the only guarantee on offer is that one can expect to be mistreated, exploited, insulted and abandoned if one stays in Ireland.

Fourteen million euro for a guarantee is very little. The Government spent as much in its attempt to abolish the Seanad. Similarly to its approach to the Seanad, the Government is intent on not tackling the issue but hoping it will just go away. The International Labour Organization stated that a real youth guarantee would cost more than twice the amount pledged by the EU. Ireland is approximately €333 million short of the investment it needs. There is no money to invest in the future of our people, but the Government was always generous when bondholders came calling.

What we have is a Government that never really set about tackling unemployment or improving access to training or education. This is a Government that decided to do everything in its power to get out of the bailout only so that it could say it had done so and pretend that really meant something, while our children emigrated and we faced decades of repaying debt we had never incurred in the first place.

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