Ivana Bacik (Independent)

By agreement, I will use eight rather than the full 12, as I want to allow colleagues speak also. As Senator McCarthy said, there is nobody present on the Government side of the House to counter the motion we are putting to the House. As a result, I hope the Government will just agree to it, although that is unlikely to happen.

The motion tabled by the Labour Party calls on Seanad Éireann to note with concern the rise in joblessness in Ireland, in particular the rise in youth unemployment, and calls on the Government to implement a jobs strategy, including retraining and back to education support, to tackle the crisis. I welcome the Minister of State and hope the debate will not descend into platitudes. All too often, when we have debated the issue of unemployment in recent months, as we have seen horrific rises and the great human tragedy behind the figures, we have heard platitudes. Everyone on both sides of the House has condemned the rise in unemployment without offering any ideas on how it can be targeted or a real analysis of the figures. Too often the debates have been bland.

I want to change this by focusing on youth unemployment. We need to recognise the generational impact the unemployment figures have. We should move beyond speaking about unemployment, although I do not wish to dismiss the real problem and tragedy of unemployment for those at a later stage in their careers. The figures clearly indicate that the unemployment crisis we face is affecting school and college leavers particularly heavily, people who are seeking to enter the workforce for the first time. Over 74,000 people under the age of 25 years are unemployed. It was reported in a CSO quarterly household survey last year than more than one third of those aged 15 to 19 years and 23% of those aged 20 to 24 years were in neither full-time education nor employment. We are facing the reality of what has been described as a lost generation — a generation of young people for whom their only prospect of getting work lies overseas. Once again, we are facing the spectre that was present when I was in college in 1980s when many had to emigrate to find work. Happily, as things picked up, many of us were able to come back. Without any sign of an upturn on the horizon, it is difficult to see the prospects for so many young people lying at home.

The measures we adopt to tackle unemployment must be targeted at supporting school and college leavers in retraining, improving their education and skill levels and, ultimately, assisting them in finding work. If we speak about unemployment in too general a way, we will miss the point on the need for targeting. Interestingly, there has been more of a debate on this issue in Britain. Two weeks ago an article in The Observer by a young unemployed graduate, Andrew Hankinson, aged 29 years, caused a great impact. He did not pull punches and argued that graduates were picking up the tab for their parents' lives. The subtext of his article was that baby-boomers took all the good jobs, availed of free education and cheap housing, leaving their kids with nothing but the credit crunch and the bill for their pensions. His anger was focused on an older generation. This clearly expressed the fact that in Britain unemployment figures were particularly high among younger people. The article generated a significant response, mainly from older people who argued they should not be blamed for the recession. I will pick up on some of his points which are pertinent to this country. Ireland is set in a very different context because we had very severe economic problems in the 1970s and 1980s, when the rate of unemployment was much higher than it is now. The older generation did not have it easy and it would be unfair to suggest it did.

There are serious considerations in how we should tackle youth unemployment and focus our economic policies to take account of the generational impact of unemployment. We must remember that a significant portion of the population, largely an older demographic, have paid off their mortgages and are not facing the same massive credit issues as many younger people. We may say it is their own fault as they took out mortgages and bought big cars. I know from canvassing in different areas of Dublin that there are people still in work who are very concerned about their futures as they see jobs being lost through redundancies in the private sector and pay cuts in the public sector. Such persons may have enormous outgoings on mortgages and other loans. They are being squeezed nearly as much as the twenty-somethings who are finding it difficult to find work in the first place.

The idea that events have a different impact on separate generations is recognised in the tourism industry which specifically targets the grey pound or euro. Fáilte Ireland has been offering packages to older tourists, in particular. There is a recognition that younger generations have less disposable income and wealth. It is important we look at this to try to find solutions to the current crisis. For example, there are questions to be asked about reforming tax policies and focusing on assets rather than income. That nettle has not been grasped. As the motion states, a focus on offering educational opportunities to younger people is critical to the solution.

The Government amendment to the Labour Party motion commends the Government on implementing policies and an employment subsidy scheme, etc. There are some impressive figures but the reality is different. The new graduate employment scheme can be condemned as tokenistic. Despite the figures given by the Government in the amendment, we still see very small numbers actually being helped by any of the measures announced by it with great fanfare.

In December Labour Youth produced a very useful document entitled, Tackling Youth Unemployment, in which it brought forward a critique of the Government's policy, pointing out that although the FÁS work placement scheme for graduates, announced with great fanfare last April, had been a welcome step, only 85 positions out of a potential figure of 2,000 had been taken up, even though nearly 2,000 individuals had applied to take part in the programme. Clearly, there was an inadequate number of placements available. I do not know what the Minister of State will say to me, but there certainly has been a much lower take-up of what was offered. The Government has not put its money where its mouth is in order to attract people back to education, especially part-time courses. If the Government was to expand the scheme of free third level tuition fees to include part-time courses, that would help to ease people back into education and an environment in which they would be likely to gain greater skills. Ultimately, they would become more employable.

The Government could adopt other measures to ensure greater opportunities for young people who are otherwise facing the dole. I urge the Minister of State to look at some of the more radical measures proposed by Labour Youth, especially the removal of tuition fees for part-time education courses, offering real work placement programmes for graduates, addressing the cuts in social welfare payments to young people that will have impacted on them very severely and not ignoring the social impact of unemployment. This applies equally to people of all ages if they are made redundant. There is a serious problem with increasing levels of depression. As such, we need to ensure there are counselling services and social supports available to those who are made unemployed.

While we need to recognise the impact of unemployment on our youth, we should note that those who criticised Andrew Hankinson for blaming the baby boomers pointed out that he should be counting his blessings for having an opportunity to write that article and to work in journalism. However, many others who were very angry responded favourably. One letter writer to the The Observer stated:

The politicians have devastated an entire generation. It was obvious that policies that favoured the financial industry and diminished all else would bring us crashing down – and they did. Get the heck out of England, kids. The wealthy have won; you have been pushed out of your own country.

That expresses the anger felt in Britain and clearly places the focus upon the difficulties for young people. We will also see increasing levels of anger in Ireland among young people who equally feel they are being forced out of this country like previous generations. It is important for all of us on both sides of the House to work together to make sure that does not happen. I, therefore, urge the Minister of State to take on board the more creative solutions and suggestions offered from all sides of the House.