James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Government has put Ireland on the path to recovery. We have a proven plan for the remainder of this decade to secure and strengthen the recovery. We are not going back to the days of boom and bust. We are not going back to the days of Fianna Fáil.

The Government got the public finances under control and we will continue to prioritise the restoration of our national competitiveness and the stability of the public finances in the years ahead. Our plan will ensure a fair sharing of the benefits of recovery with those already at work.

The Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, has secured up to €750 million in tax cuts for Ireland's workers as part of the next budget. A similar amount will be available for the later years of this decade, thus allowing for a multi-year programme of targeted tax cuts for Ireland's low-income and middle-income workers.

The Government's jobs plan will lead to full employment by 2018 and the return of our emigrants. Strong growth and jobs are funding tax cuts for working people. More people in every part of the country will start to experience the economic recovery in their daily lives.

I especially welcome the reduction in unemployment and the target to achieve full employment. Young people in school and college can look forward to a brighter future than their older brothers and sisters faced. Unemployment is a tragedy for our society, but it is especially damaging for our young people. We often miss the human stories when we quote statistics.

We are not just reducing unemployment, we are making a real improvement to the lives of our young people by ensuring that they can find jobs. Unemployment has serious long-term consequences for young people. If a young person is unemployed in their early 20s, it still has an impact on them when they are in their 40s; whereas if somebody suffers a period of unemployment for the first time in their 30s, it does not impact on them in later life in the same way.

For example, people who are unemployed in their early 20s suffer from worse health, less job satisfaction and lower earnings when they are aged 46. The same research shows that this is not the case with people who become unemployed for the first time in their 30s. In fact, a period of unemployment while young increases the likelihood of worse health in the future, less job satisfaction, lower earnings, malnutrition, depression, suicide, reduced life expectancy, heart attack in later life, and unemployment again in the future.

Many people are haunted by a period of unemployment while they are young. By putting this country back on the track of full employment, we are improving the future outcomes of our young people. The number of young people signing on the live register has almost halved from its peak of 94,000 during the economic crisis.

I know we have much more work to do to further reduce this number. I also acknowledge that some of these young people have been forced to find work abroad. I hope that any young person abroad who wants to come home is encouraged by our progress and by our determination to restore full employment. In fact, we expect net inward migration from 2017 onwards, so that young people forced out of Ireland to find work will be able to start returning home.

My Department, in consultation with the youth sector, has developed a youth employability initiative. This builds on existing youth work initiatives that increase the employability of marginalised young people in the 15 to 24 age group. My Department has compiled a mapping report which has gathered information about the innovative youth work activities and programmes under way in the sector that contribute to youth employability objectives.

This new initiative will target the hardest to reach young people who are at risk of being out of the work force, education or training. My Department has secured €600,000 for the new initiatives. It will shortly commence discussions with the education and training boards, youth officers and other youth sector stakeholders with a view to rolling out the initiative in 2015.

The overall objective is to increase young people's employability, enhance their acquisition of key competencies and transferable skills, and aid their progression to employment, education or training. Dedicated youth workers will be central to the co-ordination and management of individual projects at local level.

A successful child care policy helps people who wish to do so to participate in the economy. Improving the accessibility, affordability and quality of early years and school-age care and education is a priority for this Government. Driving this is the irrefutable evidence that shows how participation in early years and school-age care and education can confer significant benefits to children, with the greatest benefits conferred to children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Against this background, I have established an interdepartmental group on Future Investment in Early Years and School-Age Care and Education. The group, which is being chaired by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, is tasked with exploring ways of ensuring that current and future investment deliver more in terms of affordable, accessible and high quality early years and school-age care and education.

The group will submit a series of options for future investment to Government in June this year.

These options will be informed by research evidence and best practice and by existing policy commitments, including those set out in Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures: The National Policy Framework for Children and Young People 2014-2020.

The group is also soliciting the views of key stakeholders, interested parties and the public through a number of consultative processes. For this public consultation process, the interdepartmental group wants to find out what is working well and learn where it can best direct current and future investment to improve the accessibility, affordability and quality of Ireland's early years and school age care and education services.

There are two separate consultation forms available for online completion - one for all stakeholders with an interest in the field, including policy makers, practitioners, providers, advocates and academics and, importantly, one specifically for parents and guardians. The closing date for submissions from the early years sector is Friday, 1 May, and the closing date for submissions from parents and guardians is Monday, 4 May. I want to hear the voice of parents and I want to use this opportunity to appeal to them to make their voices heard in the few days that are left. The website is dcya.gov.ieon which there is a questionnaire for them to complete. I would greatly appreciate it if parents took the time to do that so that we can have their opinions reflected in any policies that arise and options for Government. We value our experts but we always remember that parents are the experts in terms of their own children, and the consultation would not be complete without hearing their voices.

We are fixing our economy, but that is just step one. As people said, we have fixed the car but where are we going? We have got to fix the services the State provides in order to fix our society. We must ensure that work pays. We must ensure that the worker takes home more pay. We must ensure that the services provided are commensurate with a republic, that all citizens are treated equally.

The recovery is starting to take hold, thanks to the sacrifices of the Irish people. The job is not finished yet. Many families are starting to feel the benefits of the recovery in their own lives, and more have yet to feel it. The recovery is fragile, and we cannot risk slipping backwards through political instability.

More jobs are the top priority. We have created more than 90,000 new jobs to date. We will create a further 40,000 this year, and we aim to achieve full employment by 2018. That is critically important because unemployment is, without doubt, the main source of inequality and unfairness in our society today. More jobs mean less tax for people working and more revenue to provide better services.

We talk about 90,000 new jobs but behind each one of those jobs is a real person who now has more financial independence, whose family can look forward to the future with greater confidence and hope, and whose communities have more money circulating. Importantly for the individual is the restoration of self-esteem and dignity that is often lost when their job goes. Each person coming off social protection means we have €20,000 more to give back to workers in tax cuts to make work more valuable and also to invest in our services.

In short, this spring statement is a clear roadmap on how we travel as we fix our economy and get our people back to work, repair our services and restore our community and society.

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