Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor Pissarides for taking the time to be with us today. There are two categories of young unemployed person. We have highly qualified young people who feel frustrated because there are no jobs, but there is also a set of young people who have grown up in the tradition of unemployment. I was involved in a project that helped young people who had dropped out of school. We worked with them to try to get them into employment. When we surveyed these people five years later, at a time when the country was doing well, we found that neither their fathers nor their grandfathers had worked. We now have a problem because of the recession, as it is even more difficult for people to escape from that rut.

We need to focus on people with good qualifications, but we also need to focus on those families in which nobody has been employed since before the grandparents' time. Is there a policy at European level to deal with that problem across Europe and to focus on areas in which no progress has been made, even in good times? We can easily forget about that. I think we must focus on this problem area.