Kathryn Reilly (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am glad Senator Gilroy mentioned that he is ambitious for our young people. I am also glad that when we held the EU Presidency, we championed the youth guarantee and that it was agreed under the watch of our Ministers. As an EU member state with one of the highest rates of young people not in employment, education or training, it is fitting that we would lead the charge to help young people. However, I found that once the parades were over and July came and following the fanfare, the press conferences, the ministerial meetings and the passing of the mantel, we dropped the ball spectacularly through what was announced by the Minister today.

The Minister for Finance opened his speech with a quote from a poem by W. B. Yeats so I will do the same. I know I have used this quote a number of times. Yeats mentioned that this is "no country for old men" but this budget proves that it is no country for young men or women. Some of the rhetoric that has been uttered in the past couple of months relating to youth unemployment and the youth guarantee makes it look like Ministers and the Government have been talking out of both sides of their mouths. We heard about the need for a well-resourced guarantee, that young people are our future and that youth unemployment was such a plague on our society and our economy that we need to address it urgently. The talk was of giving young people their say and their independence and preventing emigration, the loss of skills and talent and a lost generation. We spent the past six months talking the talk on the youth guarantee and youth unemployment but when it came to walking the walk, the Government fell over the boots it has become too big for.

What made my stomach lurch more than anything earlier was when I heard that the allocation for the youth guarantee was only €14 million. Only a number of months ago, Senators in this Chamber and Deputies in the other House welcomed the report I produced on the youth guarantee. It was a cross-party report built on consensus and input from youth organisations. We called for the Swedish model of the youth guarantee to be followed. That would have involved the allocation of €6,600 per participant, as Senator van Turnhout referred to earlier, but what did we do? As I already mentioned, we championed this guarantee. Yet, we allocated €260.22 per young person officially unemployed. Those quarterly national household survey figures are relatively conservative and do not take into account young people who are not engaged with the public employment services.

Why is it that a person aged between 18 and 25 years can vote, pay taxes, contribute to society in other ways and be held responsible for their actions but are treated completely differently to someone who is ten, 20 or 30 years their senior when it comes to being impoverished and in trouble? This is discrimination in its most blatant guise. The Minister of State with responsibility for trade and development, Deputy Costello, was right when he said of the Social Welfare Bill of 2010, which contained cuts to jobseeker's allowance for young people, that: "A whole generation of young people are being shunned by the Government of their country. They are being told that they are a burden and not wanted. They must leave the country or live in dire poverty". Who thought a Labour Minister would perpetuate this policy of age discrimination introduced first by Fianna Fáil and slash jobseeker's allowance for young people again? The Minister for Social Protection was right when she asked, "What else has austerity done? It has brought the return of the emigrant aeroplane". It is a good thing the air travel tax was cut today because the emigrant aeroplane is back again and this Government has made sure that those who can afford to leave will do so while those who cannot afford to leave - we must remember that emigration is not open to everyone - will live in poverty.

In September 2013, the leader of the Labour Party, Deputy Gilmore, made a promise to young people across the State. He said that the generation that did so little to create this crisis should not be the ones to pay the highest price. Today, just over a month later, a Labour Minister has done the complete opposite. He has not only punished young people for a crisis they did not create but has ensured that the only guarantee this Government will give to young people is emigration. Today is a bad day for Fine Gael and Labour, for the country and for young people.