Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Acting Chairman for the introduction. I could return some of those compliments and enlarge on them. Be that as it may, I appreciate the kind remarks and wish him well. I know he will chair the session with great skill.

I congratulate my great personal friend, the Minister, Deputy Mary Mitchell O'Connor, on her appointment. I am delighted for her and I think she will bring to the office a tremendous energy and a natural leadership skill. I am confident she will get the results and I wish her well.

As a background to this debate, there is nothing that gives people more dignity than a job. It is crucial to the family and friends of people and to their whole self worth. It is important to keep that perspective in mind. The dignity of work is so important to people and it is sadly absent from those who do not have it. It is well-established that the way to remove people from the poverty trap is to get them employment. The intergenerational effect of getting people back to work is enormous. About three generations will be affected by somebody coming off unemployment. The great success of our times and of the recent past has been reducing unemployment. No other achievement is greater and we should revel in it and be proud of it. Since 2012, 155,000 more people are at work than previously. We are about to break the 2 million number of people in employment in the country.

In May 2016, the unemployment level was 7.8%. Of course we are not happy with that level but it is a huge change from 15.1%. Youth unemployment has fallen by 5% in the past year from a level of 15%. All of these achievements are enormous. As a people and as a nation we can be proud of them because every individual in the country contributed to this outcome. In that context, I congratulate the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Richard Bruton, previously Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, and his Minister of State, Deputy Damien English, on their achievements in that sphere. What has been achieved to date should give us confidence that we can finish the job and get much more done. The big challenge is to bring back our emigrants. We have an enormous pool of talent among our emigrants and we need to get them back. With their new experiences, the great education with which they left and their natural flair, they will come back and create jobs, so it will have a domino or a multiplier effect.

There are some things that are not glamorous but which need to be said in this debate. We need to keep the public finances under control. We have to remain competitive. If we keep the public finances under control, borrowing for infrastructure will be cheaper and will be available to us. Inward investment will be attracted to the country. In addition to keeping the public finances under control, we need to maintain the correct tax environment. Also, and this is not a very popular concept, we need to keep wage control. The greatest act of patriotism and the greatest act of selflessness that our workers and their organised bodies can do is to engage while achieving realistic and well-justified pay increases as the economy improves but to show the level of restraint that will allow for further job creation. The kind of patriotism that is called for now is a new patriotism. It is the new Christianity in action, the new meitheal or the new commitment to the common good. We need to see everything in terms of job creation and we need to be restrained in wage demands with that in mind.

If we have industrial unrest, it will adversely affect inward investment and create all kinds of difficulties. One good aspect of job creation to date is the good cross-sector increase in jobs.We have had 9,500 new jobs in the construction sector in the first quarter of 2016. That is important. There is great potential to increase the number of jobs in construction as the housing crisis is tackled. We need major emphasis on apprenticeship training, upskilling workers and creating the skills among displaced former construction workers so that they can re-embrace the sector. An interesting thing-----