Kathryn Reilly (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to see the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Richard Bruton, in the House to answer this Adjournment matter. Senator Averil Power could not believe my excitement at the prospect.

Last July the Minister said in the Dáil during Leaders' Questions that dealing with the issue of youth unemployment is what gets him and his Government colleagues up in the morning.

However, after the call for submissions for the jobs action plan went out, I question whether he might be a bit of a late starter in the mornings. When the budget cuts on young people were introduced earlier this week, I had a lot of questions about that. Not only is youth unemployment not included in one of the seven priorities named in the call for submissions for the action plan, there has been no indication that there will be any specific jobs strategy for young people in the plan, as was called for by the USI, the ISSU or ICTU, or even our own Joint Oireachtas Committee on European Union Affairs. If we take that in tandem with the cuts to the jobseeker's allowance this week, I would be very fearful that we are not prioritising youth unemployment and that we might actually be brushing the problem under the carpet.

On today's edition of www.thejournal.ie, two former presidents of the students' union in Trinity College Dublin and UCD, Andrew Bryne and Dan Hayden, sum up brilliantly the plight of young people and what the budget has done for them.

The cuts to jobseeker's allowance for those under 26 will have the effect of pushing a significant number of young people below the poverty line and out of the country...The best that can be said about the impact of the policies towards young people pursued by this Government since it took power is that they are consistent. Consistent in imposing the costs of adjustment on those least able to resist them. And consistent in pushing them towards leaving this country.

In the same publication, Dan O'Neill and Fiona Dunkin state the following.

The government are seizing the independence of an entire group, increasing their dependence on their already hard-pressed parents and forcing many into poverty.
The considerably widely-held notion of "getting on your bike" and finding a job is utterly ridiculous. With one report from , it is quite clear that we cannot cycle along a route to nowhere.

These are just some of the contributions in the media from a number of observers.

Funding was made available this week for the youth guarantee, which was supposed to be the cornerstone of a policy to help young people who were not in employment, education or training, but only €14 million was allocated. Only a number of months ago, the European Union affairs committee put together a report on the youth guarantee. It was a cross-party report that was built on consensus, with a lot of input from youth organisations like the National Youth Council of Ireland, the European Youth Forum and previous board members of Youthreach. They called for the Swedish model of the youth guarantee to be implemented. That is supposed to be best practice and under that model, €6,600 per participant would be allocated, but the allocations announced here the other day came to €260.22 per young person who is officially unemployed under the Quarterly National Household Survey.

When the Minister was questioned earlier this year about youth unemployment, the TD involved said that he should stay in bed if that was the best he could do. I would not say that myself, but I would agree that if youth unemployment was such a pressing concern, there should be a national jobs strategy for young people included in the action plan for jobs for next year, and that he would take submissions from the relevant groups on this. If possible, he would also meet the Minister, Deputy Burton, and examine the cuts to the youth jobseeker's allowance and how that affects young people in looking for employment, and how it could actually restrict them from actively seeking work.