Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy stated that there had been some recovery but it had not been felt by everybody. Yesterday we had the best figures for the live register and people returning to work for more than five and a half years. We still have a long way to go, but unemployment has fallen to its lowest level in five and a half years and now stands at 11.1%. I spoke to people yesterday from the Construction Industry Federation, CIF, on which the Deputy is an acknowledged expert. In Grangegorman a huge number of people are now at work on what had become a derelict site in the centre of Dublin, which is now being transformed by some of the best building work in Europe. I discussed with the representatives of the CIF the issue of apprenticeships - something about which the Deputy has spoken to me on several occasions, when he demonstrated his extensive knowledge of the subject - and trainees getting back to work. That is all positive.

The Labour Parliamentary Party meeting took place in Wexford, during which I took the opportunity to walk around Wexford and open the Intreo office. I do not know whether the Deputy knows that there has been a significant fall in the number of people in Wexford who are unemployed and an increase in the number of people at work. Is it as high as we would like? No, it is not. We have a way to go over the next four or five years to get our country to full employment. We will have a budget in two weeks' time in which, for the first time since we inherited from the former Fianna Fáil Government an economy, a country and a society in meltdown, we will reach the level of deficit that is required. We now have 75,000 more people at work, compared to the 350,000 jobs the country lost in the three years following the bank guarantee. I agree that the country has a long way to go to put everybody who wants to work back to work. Approximately 80,000 people who were employed in construction, as the Deputy knows, are on the live register. My objective is to get as many of them as possible back to work by building up the construction sector from its current level of 6.5% to double that, which would be the normal level of construction activity in a country such as ours, in order to build homes for families who need them.

The Deputy is correct; these are the important things for people in Ireland. It is also important that the system of governance that we have should be as good as we can make it. In regard to the public sector, which is run by State boards, we need to make sure we have the best people we can, from a variety of backgrounds and circumstances and with a variety of skills, on those boards. That is what the Taoiseach has now agreed and confirmed to me, as leader of the Labour Party, which is a positive step forward for the country. I very much welcome the support of the Taoiseach and both parties in government for that. It will help to rebuild this country.

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