Kathryn Reilly (Sinn Fein)

There is a jobs crisis in our community which can be seen every day on the streets, standing on dole queues, and getting on planes saying goodbye to their native land. Our people demand to be brought back to work and in order to meet this demand we need investment proportionate to the crisis we are facing. We need to invest in our economy to deliver employment and increase competitiveness and growth. We need to stop spending billions of euro bailing out banks and servicing unsustainable debt. Investment must increase and we must increase the money we are making available to the economy. This jobs initiative has had to be revenue neutral and is on a scale that cannot make an impact and is therefore a lost opportunity of sorts. We need a jobs stimulus that will put people back to work and inject growth back into the economy. We need to take the big decisions to invest in the State's infrastructure and people. To date we have been following irrational strategies of austerity and bailing out insolvent banks. That has continually limited our options and landed us in our bailout - it has landed Greece in its second one. We need to start discussing strategies that open up options to free us from the bailout trap in which we find ourselves.

It will take a number of complementary steps for employment, growth and competitiveness. One step is labour activation. Only €29 million of the jobs initiative fund is allocated to jobs activation measures, which means that long-term unemployed people will essentially receive little benefit from the initiative. The Government needs to move swiftly to address a situation where for the first time in our history more than half of those who are unemployed are long-term unemployed. Recent figures from the British Department for Work and Pensions show that the number of Irish people moving to live in Britain last year increased by 25% to 13,920. The overwhelming majority of these people are in the 18 to 34 cohort. Young, educated and skilled people are leaving the State in their droves. While we welcome aspects of the Government's jobs initiative, it falls short of what is required to create jobs. We are finding ourselves falling back on the safety valve of emigration to pay for the economic shortcomings of the past.

The jobs initiative contains much less than what we were promised and what is required. Both Fine Gael and the Labour Party need to make good on the faith invested in them by the electorate and need to deliver on their election commitments. They need to stem the tide of emigration that is depriving us of so many talented young people and they need to get over 400,000 people off the live register into employment. The people are looking to Members of the Oireachtas for hope but we are hearing only platitudes.