Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Instead of looking at the glass half empty, as the Deputy seems to be able to do very well, why does he not look at the reality that this time last year, 18% of our young people were unemployed while today, only 13% are unemployed? This means 5% of the people who have engaged over the past year with JobPath, community employment, jobs clubs, local employment services and Tús have managed to get full-time work. We now have 26,000 people under the age of 26 on jobseeker's allowance and we will not stop until we have none.

We will do that by interacting with them to make sure that they receive training, so that their skills will match the jobs that are there. We all know that there are jobs there. We all know that we are coming very close to full employment. The doors of the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation are being beaten down at present with requests to get people in from foreign countries to come in and take up the jobs that are here. As such, I am not going to stop. We are not going to increase dependency on welfare for anybody under the age of 26. We are far more ambitious for young people in this country than Deputy Brady seems to be.

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