Alex White (Labour)

I support Senator Fitzgerald's call for a debate on social workers, particularly those dealing with children. The Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children with responsibility for children, Deputy Barry Andrews, should address the issue in this House. Like Senator Fitzgerald, I am a member of the Joint Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children. We hope to issue our final report shortly but we are at present struggling with the question of a constitutional referendum on children's rights. While I believe this would represent an important step forward, an even bigger step would be to allocate sufficient social workers to deal with the daily demands of the system. That should not have to await the report of any committee before being made a Government priority.

I ask the Leader to arrange a debate on the specific and urgent issue of youth unemployment. The FÁS report which was published today confirms what many of us already suspected, namely, that men under the age of 24 are the worst affected by unemployment. We are facing the risk that the legacy of this recession will be a lost generation. Tens of thousands of young people will have little prospect of working in their own country. Emigration has already resumed and we are threatened with a recurrence of the events of the 1980s. I ask that the debate on youth unemployment be facilitated by proposals from the Government on how we will confront this scourge.