Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Deputy Costello. The first person speaking in this series, Mr. Gay Mitchell, MEP, indicated that this process is probably the closest form to European-style interaction, and it can be contrasted to the adversarial system in the Dáil. I hope Ms Costello feels at home, as people are discussing ideas here rather than calling for resignations. I will certainly not be doing that.

The numbers provided were graphic, indicating 23.4% unemployment among young people in Europe. The rate is above 50% in Spain and Greece. That is the first issue to be considered. A fixed exchange rate with Germany will cause massive youth unemployment in Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy.

I realise that to look at the presence of those countries in the euro would involve loss of face for bankers, the bureaucrats and so on but I much prefer that to loss of jobs, particularly by young people. That policy may have to be reassessed. It is difficult to see what can happen to Greece with a fixed exchange rate with Germany with 50% of young people bearing that burden.

In assessing the budget, the Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, must also be questioned. Ms Costello mentioned the food needs of people. One of the purposes of the CAP is to maintain food prices and I derive no satisfaction from UK studies that found that large landowners and aristocrats are the major beneficiaries of the policy because they own more land than others. In pursuing goals, significant Structural Funds and some European Investment Bank money was spent but even with the grant included, it adds more to the debt than to output in the state. A stricter assessment of what some of these proposals accomplish is needed, given the dire situation that all member states are in, and Ireland more spectacularly. Such pump priming projects work better when a state's debt to GDP ratio is 20% or 25%, not when it is approaching 100% as it is in most member states.

The youth guarantee schemes are most interesting because the burden has been imposed so heavily on young people. Ms Costello mentioned the 27.7% youth unemployment rate in Ireland. The onus must be put on employers to create more internships and to bring young people in from the margins to experience work. Senator Quinn referred in his book to a man who began a career operating the trolleys in supermarkets. A job leads to another job whereas unrequited or one-way social welfare payments do not lead to anything and build up dependency. We do nobody a favour by giving him or her a payment on condition that he or she does not do anything else and can go to play pool or something else. We must have something better to offer as a reciprocal benefit to the recipient while retaining the cash payment because they have to live as well.

The Minister for Social Protection has drawn our attention to a particular problem. A habit developed during the boom era of putting people on disability and invalidity payments as a consequence of which Ireland has more households with nobody in employment than anywhere else despite spending more on child benefit. Reforms that will improve the lot of our youth by helping them to live in a house where there is at least one worker would be immensely valuable to us. Internships lead to something and the dead end of welfare payments, including those for illness and invalidity, must be addressed.

Is there a way to tackle the language problem in the Union? Ireland suffers from being unilingual and that has been exacerbated recently. Economically, we are in the EU but, linguistically, we have never joined. Should schemes of assistance from Germany and France include French and German people travelling to Irish schools to help improve the employability and the workability in the market? Ms Costello's contribution has been stimulating and I wish her every good fortune. We need to turn Europe around. She pointed out the targets but since the onset of the banking crisis, we have been going in the wrong direction. Sometimes I do not hear enough radicalism from Europe, though I do not refer to her in this regard.