Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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4. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation why the Government’s timeline for job targets has been extended to 2020 from what was previously declared by the Taoiseach in January 2015; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2144/16]

Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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When it comes to facts the Taoiseach is about as reliable as the Irish weather. He changed completely the goalposts in regard to job creation targets conveniently enough during the Christmas break, in the hope that nobody would notice. He says that full employment, which the Minister defines at 6%, will be achieved by 2020 instead of 2018. Will the Minister outline the background to that change? Will he also clarify why the Government agreed that 6% would be regarded as full employment?

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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This week we launched the fifth Action Plan for Jobs. A key objective of the Action Plan for Jobs process has been to rebuild our economy based on enterprise and entrepreneurship, talent, innovation and exports and provide a solid foundation for future growth. The Action Plan is a to-do list for the economy - a to-do list for the whole of Government. Most importantly it publically commits to exact timetables for delivery with the Department of the Taoiseach together with my Department overseeing and driving implementation and publishing a delivery record each quarter for all to see. It is because of these structures and this approach that the OECD in its review of the APJ in 2014 said it: "marks an important innovation in Irish governance." When we launched the first Action Plan for Jobs in 2012, we set ourselves the target of creating 100,000 extra jobs by 2016, which we surpassed a year and a half ahead of schedule. Therefore, when we launched the 2015 action plan last January, we set a new target to have 2.1 million people in employment by 2018. That target has not changed and is one of the five strategic ambitions we have committed to in the 2016 plan.

In November 2015, we published Enterprise 2025, the ten-year jobs and enterprise strategy which provides the roadmap to build a sustainable economy and have 2.18 million people at work by 2020, an additional 80,000. This would mean more people at work than at any time in the history of the State. We now have the ambition of bringing home 70,000 of the emigrants who were forced to leave due to the crash caused by the policies pursued by the last Government.

The Action Plan for Jobs complements the Government’s Pathways to Work which sets out actions to be taken in support of those who are currently unemployed to help them access the labour market and new job opportunities. Last week, the Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection published the new Pathways to Work strategy for the period to 2020. Our Departments will continue to build on the progress to date through the Action Plan for Jobs and Pathways to Work to ensure that more employment opportunities are available to those who are seeking work and, therefore, reducing unemployment.

Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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The Taoiseach said that the 6% would be achieved by 2018.

Why is it that in other economies, such as Germany, 4.5% is regarded as full employment whereas we are going for the higher rate?

The Minister has not outlined the reason for the change or why the targets are being pushed back. The Department of Finance indicated in October that we would not achieve a 6.4% rate in 2020 or a 6.2% rate in 2021. The Minister can talk about action plans for jobs and targets and everything the OECD says but this represents a serious shift in the goalposts.

It is true that emigration happened. The amount of emigration that happened is equivalent to another 6% on top of the unemployment rate. Even bringing those people back and giving them the opportunity to come back into employment does not account for the shift in the goalposts that has occurred.

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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The Deputy should understand that what we can influence is the number of jobs that are created. That is the central target we have always set ourselves. It was a target of 100,000 and it is now a 200,000 target. Obviously, projecting the impact that has on the number of unemployed will depend on a number of factors that are less easy for a government to predict exactly because they include the flow of inward and outward migration, a natural increase in the labour force and so on. Essentially, we are predicting and building our targets around a growth of 10% in the total number at work. We envisage that a significant part of that will impact on those who are out of work and that has been the record in recent years. That ten points will be spread between reducing the 8.8% rate below 6% as well as accommodating 70,000 people who we now believe can be attracted to come home.

We have not changed the job targets in any way but I suppose we are being a little more conservative in terms of when the 6% rate will be reached. That is part of official forecasting.

I remind the Deputy that when I launched the Action Plan for Jobs and forecasted 100,000 extra jobs, the Department of Finance forecasted that unemployment this year would be 11.6%. We have comfortably beaten that because of the ambition we have set and the implementation that we have delivered.

Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome that the Minister's ambition is better than that of the Department of Finance. However, can the Minister explain why he is focusing on 6% versus 4.5% in Germany? As Deputy Tóibín has said, the reality is that we still have 88,000 people on activation schemes. We still have another 100,000 part-time workers who are seeking full-time employment and who are in receipt of a payment. We have many people abroad but if they were here, they would be part of that figure. The Minister has dismissed the activation schemes somewhat as not forming part of the jobs plan but most of those 88,000 people are looking for full-time employment. If they are not feeding in to the labour market or providing opportunities for the labour market, then it is an issue the Tánaiste needs to address. As long as the Government continues to exclude them from the overall figures, there is something seriously flawed with our unemployment model.

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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Let us consider the Irish economy other than in the period when it was overheating. Full employment was in the range of 5% to 6%. That is where we aim to get to by 2020. However, one of our key ambitions is that it will be a sustainable level of full employment and that the economy will not be subject to the buffeting that happened when we were reliant on the construction sector to get to those low rates.

We want to build a strong economy. The Minister for Social Protection set out a number of successful programmes that have delivered more people from the unemployment numbers. Let us consider the fall in the unemployment rate. It has consistently outperformed forecasts because we have been successful in getting people from the live register onto work schemes. In 2015, the year gone by, 135,000 people left the live register to take up work. That is a strong performance. As a proportion of those unemployed, that is the highest in five years, with some 42% leaving the live register to take up work. Strategies such as Pathways to Work are impacting on the live register and we aim to continue and improve them.