Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

From the opening contribution by Senator Cullinane on behalf of Sinn Féin, it seems to me that Sinn Féin has no faith or belief in and no hope for our young people. That is deeply regrettable in the context of attempting to pretend to speak on their behalf. What young person and what parent, aunt, uncle, brother or sister of a young person wants to see an 18 year old heading down to the dole office and being in a state of dependency for an unlimited number of years?

I listened very carefully to Senator Power, who is quite an expert on social welfare, having worked for the previous Minister in this area for a significant number of years. This is certainly a major change in social welfare policy. The purpose of the change, and in fairness Senator Mooney alluded to it, is to try to turn something that has become a support or crutch and instead offer support which would be more developmental and positive for the individual. I appreciate that change is difficult. On becoming Minister for Social Protection, what amazed me most was the rise in the number of jobless families during the longest boom in Irish history. At the height of the boom from 2005 to 2007, the numbers of jobless families rose from the European average of being under 10% to 11% to 15%.

Nobody in Fianna Fáil has ever explained the following to me. Why did the number of jobless families go totally off the Richter scale at the height of the boom? A jobless family means that none of the adults has a significant amount of work. It also means that the outlook for children in those families to subsequently, for instance, do as well as possible and reach their greatest potential, in terms of education and so on, is significantly reduced. We are now saying to young people that the country will support them but back to work, education and training.

Senator Cullinane made a slightly disparaging remark about young people participating in JobBridge. I can tell him that 9,000 employers and other organisations support JobBridge.