Paschal Donohoe (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Calleary. I commend the Labour Party on its motion. It is important that we are discussing the matter. As I was getting ready for this debate I was reminded of the film title, "No Country for Old Men". That was adapted over the weekend by a newspaper which said it is no country for young men and women.

One of the figures I came across in my preparations is one that many of my colleagues have used this evening, namely, that one in three men under the age of 25 is unemployed. I spent some time trying to understand the reality of that headline figure and to get beyond it. That work was done yesterday by Ronan Lyons, an economist who works with the website, www.daft.ie. He has carried out a chilling analysis of the Central Statistics Office, CSO, figures to show what is happening to young people. I wish to focus on three points from his work that have not been made in this debate.

His first point is that in 2006 there were 175,000 people under the age of 25 at work. He estimated that 100,000 or 55% of the jobs available to people under the age of 25 are now gone. The second point is the degree to which emigration is hiding the extent to which unemployment is savaging young people. There has been some discussion about that in this debate. He estimates that emigration is hiding the disappearance of a further 20% of jobs that would have been available to men under the age of 25. He also made a point which is terrible to contemplate. He indicated that the population of men under the age of 25 — I am sure it is the same for women — was 325,000 but it is now 290,000. We have lost 35,000 of those people who were at their most productive in terms of working hours and the commitment and enthusiasm they brought to what they were doing.

He has carried out an analysis of what is happening on a county basis to try to understand where the real pressure points are. I am most familiar with what is happening in Dublin. Over the weekend it became apparent 22,000 people under the age of 25 are without work. Almost two out of every three young men in Limerick is signing on. The position is similar in counties Clare, Tipperary, Donegal, Louth and Waterford. Half of the young men living in those counties are signing on. My colleagues touched on the major blight this represents and the way it is scarring the ability of the State to move forward. The engines of economic growth in the past were the quality of the young people and the education, skills and understanding of computers they had accumulated. That stock of human knowledge and capacity to move our economy forward is in this state with half and, sometimes two thirds, of young people signing on in some cities and counties. That is deplorable and must be recognised for what it is — a huge loss of human capital at a time it is needed to move the economy forward.

All the work done by economists establishes that if a person leaves the labour force when he or she is young, it is much more difficult for him or her to return. Danny Blanchflower is an economist in the UK who was formerly a member of the Bank of England monetary policy committee. He identified a group of people entitled NEETS, not in employment, education or training. The fact they are not working not only represents a tragic loss of human capital but also a loss of spending power and tax revenue because they are unable to contribute, and this is at the heart of the fiscal difficulties we face. Our party has identified that 40% of the budget deficit is due to unemployment and it is deplorable that much of that burden is falling on our young.