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

To establish whether someone is employed, the quarterly national household survey asks the question: "Did you work even one hour in the last seven days ending on Sunday?" In addition, the survey manual states that a person on internships, Tús, JobBridge or community employment is considered to be in paid work. The unequivocal result is that the employment rate is seriously inflated by the number of people on activation schemes and, conversely, the headline unemployment rate is significantly understated in a similar manner.

The recent report from the Oireachtas Library and Research Service considered what the real unemployment rate would be if jobseekers engaged in activation schemes were no longer counted as employed. It looked at the period ending in the third quarter of 2013 and found that, in the absence of these schemes, the unemployment rate for that quarter would have been 15.9%, not the 13% reported. The Government's new ecosystem of phoney activation schemes means that the rate of unemployment is a full 3% higher than reported.

In the three years since the Government has come to power, 266,000 Irish people have emigrated. That is over 80,000 people a year, 1,705 people a week, 243 people a day or ten people an hour. This figure alone is a shocking indictment of the Government's job creation failure. It is a stark figure and no amount of spin can soften it. The vast majority of the people in this statistic have been ripped out of their family environment by economic necessity and thrown into an uncertain future abroad. As far as the Irish economy is concerned, these figures reflect the effective inactivation of 250,000 Irish people by this Government. Some 127,000 people of working age have emigrated since 2009. Had these people stayed in the State, the unemployment level would be 19.7%. If we add this figure to the Government's phoney activation schemes, the unemployment rate increases to 22.6%, double the one promoted by the Government.

It is important to say that we in Sinn Féin are not against activation schemes per se. However, the ones coming from the Government, such as Gateway, Tús and JobBridge, are objectionable on a fundamental level. We are on record with regard to welcoming initiatives such as Intreo and JobsPlus, but with Gateway citizens are getting €1 an hour to work alongside others who are on multiples of that wage for doing exactly the same work, and there is no training involved. This is a coercive salary swipe. The Government shed thousands of waged people in local authorities to replace them with 3,000 unwaged people. It is blatant job displacement. In fact, this programme costs real jobs in local authorities.

While the Government is cynically busying itself massaging the unemployment figures, the real indigenous enterprise sector, the real engine of job creation in this State, has still not experienced the necessary reforms with regard to the dangerously distressed levels of credit provision, the cost of doing business and progressive rates. Three years since the announcement of the much-heralded strategic investment bank, it is still in limbo, and promises to insulate over 1 million homes have yet to be seen. Where is the necessary urgency on this issue?

A total of 500,000 Irish families are the victims of the Fine Gael-Labour Government's and the Fianna Fáil Government's economic policies. I ask the Government, for the sake of these people, to focus on energising the real economy and stop massaging these unemployment figures.

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