Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Professor Pissarides and compliment him on winning the Nobel Prize having grown up on the island of Cyprus and then gone to the University of Essex and the London School of Economics. What he said to us about the lost generation will certainly stop us in our tracks as we try to deal with the problem of youth unemployment throughout Europe. This is not the only honour for the professor today. The Trinity College Historical Society will present him with its gold medal this evening as an appreciation by young people for his work. That society was founded in April 1747 by Edmund Burke. His biographer stated that he found in Trinity College Dublin an amount of intellectual activity considerably greater than that which Gibbon a few years later found in Oxford. I hope the professor finds TCD provides that degree of stimulus when he goes there this evening.

I note the professor's emphasis on dealing with unemployment on a micro level. In Ireland probably more than anywhere else we have learned that quantitative easing leads to much faster results in stock exchanges and banks, and then precipitates a property boom from which we are now trying to recover with horrendous consequences because it limits utterly the ability of the Government to tackle the issues the professor has raised so strongly with us. I agree with the emphasis on such micro approaches because the experience of QE in Ireland has probably been among the biggest disasters of any country. Given that our resources are limited, the questions that arise from the professor's presentation relate to the type of education we should have. Can he think of areas of investment in education that we should expand or areas of investment in education that we should reconsider?

Regarding the professor's project appraisals, we had a massive problem with one of the biggest public capital programmes relative to GDP to be found anywhere. The background would be a strong tradition of engineer dominance, rent seeking by the construction industry and a lack of project appraisal resulting in projects that add more to the country's debt than to its GDP as they work out. As Senator Bacik mentioned, we had a problem with labour market quangos - one of which was spending ¤1 billion of EU funds in a period when unemployment was virtually non-existent at 4%.

While I hate the term, an important consideration for us is how to get more bang for a buck in these areas. I ask the professor, developing his major points, to outline any ideas he has to help us to focus. We are seriously in debt and in an IMF rescue programme. We are trying to do, as other Senators have said, so much in terms of 90% retention rates at second level and so on but we need to use our resources very efficiently because we made so many mistakes and used up so many of our resources previously.

The professor mentioned the European Investment Bank. Can it hone its investments to a better rate of return on projects? Do we need a central office of project evaluation? Would he require the evaluations to be published well in advance in order that economists, such as him, could assess whether the projects were worthwhile. It is an economy where rent seeking and regulatory capture were features. Today's newspapers have again highlighted that we are still captured by banks that are largely exempted from the consequences of the damage they imposed on the country.

I thank the professor for his words of wisdom, which are very important to us. We have a major problem to address. I refer to other points mentioned by Senators. In education we have a mathematics problem, which has been discussed in this House. We also have a problem with languages, also referred to today. Is that inherent in all countries in which people speak English? People do not learn enough languages to trade with the BRIC countries and the wider world.

I thank Professor Pissarides for addressing the House. We look forward to his replies.