Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

-----and Senator O'Donnell, will recognise the phenomenon of a certain kind of young person who will slightly shrink back and appear to want to be left alone because he or she is not sure what is going on. I went to a graduation ceremony some months later and one would not believe the difference. The young people were wearing very nice shirts and chinos. Their heads were up and they were making contact and talking with friends on the course which was run in conjunction with Coláiste Dhúlaig. Many of them were beginning to set out on the road to work.

The scheme is about giving people confidence and restoring their self esteem. The critical element is to have a strong working relationship between the education and training boards and the Intreo offices. We have begun to roll out the first of the employer forums around the country. In addition to Ballymun I launched one recently with a number of employers in Carlow and Blanchardstown. The aim is essentially to include unemployed people, not just those below a specific age, in the process.

I spoke recently to someone who has a garden centre and who is employing people from some of the colleges. They said to me that when someone comes for an interview, regardless of the qualifications they have, they put out a box of plants and ask them to name 20 common plants. Even if they have a degree in horticulture, if they cannot relate to business they will not be high on the list of those who are recruited. What employers require is practical people. Customer service is important in retail as well as enthusiasm for the customer and the product being sold.

A question was asked about the mandatory nature of the scheme. I wish to outline what is envisaged. This is a first for Ireland and for many countries in the EU. It is intended that the youth guarantee will include a large amount of challenging, nudging, talking to and cajoling young people to identify where they would like to work, what they would like to do and whether they would like to get involved in training and education. I am aware that some Members are very familiar with the system. It often takes a while for people to open up because it is a different forum to being unemployed or in a structured situation at school. The aim is to try to get people to develop their own life plan. That is especially true for young people who are not in education, training or employment, the so-called NEETs.

This is an exciting and positive development but it will take time. Professor Blanchflower, the world-renowned economist with regard to youth unemployment, and John Martin, the deputy secretary of the OECD who is Irish, both state if one is unemployed for a long spell early in one's life, almost certainly throughout the rest of one's life one risks having lower earnings than those who did not have this experience and one risks having more frequent spells of unemployment. They state this is particularly the case for men. We want to avoid this in Ireland.

With regard to the scheme being mandatory, there is no way to force an employer to take somebody he or she feels is not good for the business or organisation. We try to encourage and make the people job ready, mentor them about what may be expected from them with regard to employment, and perhaps mentor the employer so there are realistic expectations about the young person.

We are also pioneering the disability activation scheme in the BMW region for young people with either an intellectual or physical disability. We see exactly the same thing as we see in the Ballymun project; knowledge and information is required on what the person would like to be involved in and can be involved in, and on the employment opportunities. It involves working to prepare the young person for these opportunities and to prepare the employer for their specific responses and the responsibilities they may have towards the young employee. It also seeks to include a fairly significant developmental element. Everybody here had to start in a first job and most of us would not have been brilliant. We probably got in, kept quiet and gradually picked up experience of how to deal with various tasks. It will be mandatory only where we have complete refusal to engage. When there is complete refusal to engage, it may be because people are too busy doing other things. If they are good luck to them, but society should not countenance a situation where somebody will stay unemployed indefinitely.

Without a doubt the biggest difficulty with rent supplement is supply. There are issues about rental costs but it is very simple to take the Dublin area, where it is a fact that several years ago there was three to five times as much supply as there is now. We had a housing market which was in a bubble and there were many vacant units and buy to lets, many of them owned by fairly amateur landlords. Much of this supply has simply dried up. Some time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the local authorities increasingly got out of social housing. The only significant type of social housing among most local authorities was via housing associations in conjunction with the local authority and the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. Since there was no availability of rental properties, increasingly people saw rent supplement as a solution and, to be honest, it is not. In many cases in Ireland we have very short-term leases of one year. If one is bringing up a family or living in a particular area over a long period of time, one needs to develop security of tenure and social housing does this. We also need an affordable housing approach, particularly for young couples where both are working but they do not have enough money to fund a housing mortgage themselves. They could work in co-operation with local or central government through schemes with partial renting and purchase. Many Senators know this has been very successful in the past and it should be examined.

Senator Kelly mentioned the problem of empty houses and people being reluctant to take local authority houses for a variety of reasons. In Dublin, one can see significant numbers of boarded up apartments, flats and houses in local authority areas. One can see local authority areas which have been refurbished but when a vacancy arises, it is boarded up. The Minister of State, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, has set out to identify the numbers. Senator Maloney spoke with concern about the situation in Killarney. I do not know about Killarney but certainly in Dublin, and to a lesser extent in Cork, a significant numbers of properties are boarded up. When a local authority tenant leaves a house or flat, it is often boarded up and it can remain boarded up and vacant for anything up to a year, 18 months or two years. If three or four flats in the one block are boarded up, it very quickly leads to an enhanced risk of anti-social behaviour and a general decline in the standards of the entire block, and flats for which people would give their eye teeth are left lying idle. Local authorities state this is how the system works with regard to refurbishing their housing stock. I genuinely think the system has to change. When a vacancy arises a family should be earmarked for it and should be ready to be moved into the vacancy as soon as the existing tenant has left. This is very important.

My colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, has secured quite a significant amount of funding from the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, to begin this process. If we can end this practice of local authority houses and flats being boarded up, we can bring significant numbers of accommodation units back into circulation. The number runs to well over 1,000. Some of them have been boarded up for so long that they require significant refurbishment; for others, this is not so much the case. If the leaving tenant can leave the property in a good state, all that is required in many cases is an intensive clean and a paint job. However, this is not what has come to be the practice. What has come to be the practice, particularly in some parts of Dublin including my constituency, is a tendency to board it up. Then it goes into a cycle of waiting a number of months until a small contractor is available to do refurbishment work. In this period there is often a severe deterioration of the quality of the neighbours' environment due to the boarded-up accommodation attracting anti-social behaviour.

To return to Senator Moloney's comments on Killarney, one of the problems there is a lack of development of social housing in recent years and the seasonal element to rented accommodation due to the large tourism market. I will bring the Senator's comments to the attention of the Minister of State with responsibility for housing, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan.