The Government appear to think this problem will disappear, that some miracle will happen whereby these young people and their employment problems will go away. We must realise that one of the most serious by-products of the recent recession is the dramatic growth in the number of young people out of work. We concede that the problem is not confined to Ireland, that it exists, but to a far lesser degree, in most other European countries. However, our out-of-work population under the age of 25 years is far in excess of our fellow EEC countries and for that reason a greater effort is needed by our Government to tackle this major problem. We estimate that the number of under-25s who are out of work is 50 per cent.
It can be said that our education system is directed towards white collar jobs rather than technological ones and that this has contributed to our present problem, because many school leavers and their parents are hoping for employment in that area. In the present year it matters little which kind of work they look for because there is not any anywhere.
It is a matter of growing concern that due to lack of Government initiative and action unemployment among school leavers will be worse before it improves. Whether it improves in the long term will depend on our ability to implement long term solutions and on the leadership given by those temporarily in power. We are due to receive from the EEC Social Fund £25 million between 1975 and 1977. We heard the Minister for Labour telling us about the increased moneys being made available by his Department to AnCO as the training authority, and one would have thought it was because of his activities or those of the Government. The reality is that the money has been made available by the EEC Social Fund where we were so fortunate as to have had such a brilliant Irishman as Dr. Hillery in the past four years. That is why there is so much money available for training in the Department of Labour.
If we are to see full employment by 1980 we have a lot of hard work to do. We have heard it said that there is no real problem as far as young people getting their first jobs are concerned. That is completely untrue. We have two different problems. The first is that there are not any, or very few, opportunities. The other is that the educational standards of those applying for the few jobs there are are far in excess of those needed for the jobs.
We had a report of a National Manpower survey on last year's school leavers. Some figures are available from it. Some of them, with good justification, are being questioned very critically as to their accuracy. According to this survey 27,979 young people out of a total of 53,019 got their first job last year. This figure represents a very serious situation because in addition to those left to seek employment from 1974, there were approximately 28,000 young people looking for employment or alternatively returning to school. Many of the 27,979 mentioned are in stop-gap jobs to which they would not aspire and which are probably disappointing in view of the sacrifices made by their parents and by themselves to achieve a certain standard of education. A good example of this was the recent chaotic situation that existed in regard to the bank applications when about 20,000 young people applied for a very small number of jobs.
The Government should be concerning themselves with the realities of that and the effects of the few opportunities these people have. This problem of people looking for work in these circumstances has become a major political issue. I am not here to make a political football of it, I am here to highlight it for this Government and to appeal to them to be positive. At a later stage I will suggest a positive approach which we in Fianna Fáil would take to improve the situation and it would certainly be much better than the little that is being done a present. This situation could become a veritable time bomb in the future because of the frustration and disappointment of these young people and the activities to which this Government are driving them. Many of those 20,000 young people seeking bank jobs will be really disappointed as they will not be successful. They cannot be successful, only a small percentage of them can be employed.
Many young people are marking time in jobs which are frustrating, where their true potential is not exploited and where unfortunately they are often exploited because there is a queue waiting to take their jobs should they complain. These are the realities of the situation. We are told by the National Manpower survey that 7 per cent of school leavers have not made a start to their working lives. Like many of the learned people who have already questioned this figure I would question it very critically and from my experience in my area I would say the figure of 7 per cent is very small and absolutely incorrect. As well as that we have a sizeable number who have returned to school not to continue an education programme but simply to kill time or hopefully to advance studies further, with no aim in view but merely because they cannot get employment. The approach to the reschooling of these young people should be entirely different; it should be constructively designed to teach them disciplines of working life. In other words, these should be an extension of all our training programmes. The Government must make some realistic attempt to provide jobs for these young people. If they are, as they claim, committed to a welfare state—although that seems to have changed this weekend when one of the Ministers was thinking out loud-they must extend unemployment assistance to all people over the age of 15 years who are not going to school and who are unemployed. This is not feasible or practicable because already we are paying out £1 million or more a week on unemployment assistance and benefits. The only solution is a realistic attempt to provide jobs for these young people. It has not yet come home to us fully that we have this problem. It certainly has not come home to the Government.
Our young people want to work and live at home. This is the aim of the majority and any job creation programme must be seen in the context of decentralisation. Anyone who doubts my statement need only drive on any of the roads on a Friday evening to see numbers of young people who work in Dublin hitch-hiking their way home. They work here for a week but their interests and their wish is to return home. Dublin has become a big impersonal city, a lonely place which creates serious social problems for many of them, therefore decentralisation of jobs is important.
I have referred to the problem of people returning to school for an extra year. They return at two levels mainly. We are given a figure of 8 per cent by this manpower survey of last year but one must doubt very seriously that survey in addition to doubting that 8 per cent. We have a reluctance by this Government to have any statistical information available. Statistical information is vital if we are to tackle this problem. We did not have a census, it was postponed, and only God knows when we will have a census, but we had a national manpower survey that gives us certain figures, more than a year later, in relation to the previous year's school leavers. That is not enough. If we are serious in getting such a survey we must accept that we alone of the European countries are in this category.
I said before that in a survey of the ECC countries we were shown to have 1 per cent unemployment under 25 years. We were not shown at all in the next survey, simply because everybody realised there was no serious effort by the Government to get a correct survey. The figure of 1 per cent was so nonsensical that it would have been stupid to include an Irish figure so far from the truth. If a problem is not analysed, it cannot be solved. We have often heard in the past from some Ministers opposite that to solve any problem you must first identify that problem. At the moment the basic problem is that we have no idea of the up-to-date situation regarding our school leavers.
Regarding the return to school for an extra year, young people go back at intermediate certificate or group certificate level because they have failed to get an apprenticeship. They go back at leaving certificate level because they fail to get a job and they cannot, for financial or other reasons, go on to a third level course. The structure of that school year should be arranged to include some sort of work experience programme where the students would learn the disciplines I have already mentioned.
There are several levels on which we must face our unemployment problems. There is, in fact, an EEC requirement that each member country should keep figures of employment in the 15 to 25 age group. We are failing to fulfil that requirement. I have instanced already the totally incorrect figures given last year. The National Manpower Service should be extended to compile the up-to-date information we need. It would serve two purposes. It would give us the statistics we need as a nation. There is no point in Ministers going to Europe, to the new Commissioner or to somebody else, without proper statistics. It is like going to a bank manager and telling him you want money and having no idea why you want it. We have no business going to Europe without an up-to-date survey of young people needing employment and the different levels of employment reached. The money is there and I hope we will be able to get as much money from the new Commissioner for Social Affairs as we have over the past four years. Unless our case is prepared, we certainly will not.
The second benefit would be the creation of extra jobs in the Manpower Service. At a time when there are so many young people unemployed, would it not be wonderful to give these articulate school leavers the opportunity of employment, even on a temporary basis, in compiling the necessary statistics? I referred earlier to the census. This Government have absolutely no interest in giving statistical information even to Members of the House.
I was treated with contempt in this House last week, and I resent it. My subsequent efforts to get figures omitted from a reply by the Minister for Labour have not yet been successful. I refer to Question No. 35 on 3rd November, 1976. In his reply the Minister promised to give me information in a tabular statement. According to the heading above the table, that statement should have contained two lists of figures, one for 1st October, 1976, and one for 3rd October, 1975. It did not do so. Is it that the Minister was ashamed to have those figures announced, or did he want to withhold them from me, the spokesman appointed for the time being to shadow him in this House? That conduct by any Minister is a disgrace and it is in contempt of the House. Those figures are important because they refer to the number of people registered on 3rd October last year and 1st October this year in the various manpower offices. I agree they could not be related to unemployment because there would be job changers in that group, as well, but at least they would give an indication of the impossible task facing the manpower service.
I see the solution in the short term and in the long term. As a short term measure to alleviate immediate hardship we must devise practical ways by which young people can be helped over the winter months. These initiatives must be under several headings. We must make incentives available to companies to provide productive employment for young people in proportion to the size of their work force. At the moment many employers are under-employed. There is a growing tendency to reallocate work when a job becomes vacant. This is particularly true in many office type jobs. From the employer's point of view it can be argued that present legislation is anti-employment. There are heavy welfare payments, pay-related contributions. AnCO levies, redundancy payments, employers liability, insurance premiums, all necessary in themselves, but they are loaded at this stage against the employment of young persons in particular.
We should launch a national campaign to give jobs to youths, or something of that nature. Let us launch it on a national basis. Let us encourage the employer in a choice of ways. Let us assist him by reducing the cost of the social welfare stamp. Let us extend the scope of the premium employment programme. It has been proved after 18 months in operation that the narrow guidelines laid down by the Minister for that scheme in summer, 1975, were so confined that his initial target of 10,000 jobs in 12 months has not been reached, or anywhere near it. Even after 18 months we are still short by more than 4,000 jobs of the target set. We could hope to reach that target if the scheme were extended to assist school leavers. The subject is so vast that I could speak about it all night.
I will come back to the short term in a moment. In the longer term the first essential is to survey the problem as it exists. At the moment, there is no organisation which can forecast what the trends in employment will be. It is time for the IDA and AnCO to get together and to issue some broad directives as to how employment trends will develop. Perhaps we need a new IDA on a more regional basis with more power given to the different regional groups. I am not reflecting in any way on the IDA. They have done a lot of good. I should like to see a more regional approach to the IDA with very close co-operation and liaison with AnCO and the National Manpower Service, with the National Manpower Service feeding in the information necessary and AnCO and the IDA combining to project the employment pattern or the employment trends.
I am afraid our educational system is becoming more and more geared to the minority under this Government. The opportunities are probably becoming more available for the third level student, but only for a very small number of them. The masses are being neglected; the minority alone are being catered for. If the Government are serious, it is long time past for action. They must act now or it will be too late.
I am sorry the Minister for Labour is not here, because I want to draw attention to another of his schemes or targets which is not being realised by him. Referring to the Community Youth Projects, which had been initiated in Europe as long ago as early 1975, again under the sponsorship of the Commissioner for Social Affairs, the Minister said at column 598, Volume 290, of the Official Report of 4th May last:
About 50 projects have been proposed and it is our objective to get 1,000 young people into employment as a result of the community youth training programme.
At column 599 he said:
I hope to see something like 1,000 young people employed by means of this programme during the year.
In this House last week he told us the figure was 332; we can accept that it is between 300 and 330. In other words, he has achieved only about 30 per cent of a target set by himself in May. That is another proof of absolute failure by the Minister for Labour.
Our party, responsible as always, when this Government were creating national emergencies that did not exist at all, were positive enough to still have their sights set on the real emergency that exists and did exist on 31 August and the subsequent weeks. As a result, an economic document was produced, a document that contained—and I am referring only to young persons' employment—a proposal that £20 million of the £100 million being allocated for job creation would be set aside to provide at least 5,000 new jobs in the under-25 age group.
If any impact is to be made in stimulating employment the lead must be given by the State, by the semi-State bodies, by the local authorities and by large public companies. What do we see in any areas we examine? We see all the temporary officers in the civil service being laid off, or very many of them. We see local authorities having redundancies, despite the tremendous amount of work to be done by them. We have these redundancies because of the major cutback in our Road Fund grant allocations. In every county you see major road works started and not completed. I worked for the county council as a young clerk in an engineer's office and I can tell the House a good story. In 1956, during the time of the last Coalition Government, a particular road job was opened, and the allocations we got for continuing work on that road improvement job were enough to keep the lamps lighting during the following winter. There is the same situation now.
In the present climate of high unemployment, a policy of non-recruitment by the State bodies should not be tolerated. At the same time as an overall emergency employment policy is being pursued, a special aid programme to help the young people must be undertaken, and, as I said, we would propose direct incentive to companies in the private sector. As well as that, there is no reason why the scheme which has been 30 per cent successful under the aegis of the Minister for Labour should not be 100 per cent or almost 100 per cent successful through the development of community task forces. Furthermore, there should be an extension of the AnCO apprenticeship scheme to coincide with the industrial expansion outlined in the economic policy document of our party, so that a trained work force will be available in the occupations in which they will be needed.
I do not always rely on Press reports, but I saw one recently—and I am sorry I cannot quote the newspaper —about the concern among the management of NET regarding adequate staff with sufficient expertise not being available for the new project at Marina Point. I cannot say whether that is true or not, but I would hate to think that we could not recruit enough staff within our own country. It is still a year or two away and in that time there is no reason why many of our people could not be trained to take their places at management level in that concern.
We have also suggested the encouragement of early retirement on a voluntary basis and subsidising that early retirement in order to make room at the lower levels. If half our population are under 25, the consequences are alarming if we have not the courage and the leadership to take this kind of positive action. I also referred to the introduction of the transitional year in schools, the year in which young people can be made fit for the work pace. As well as that, young workers starting on a new career, should also be encouraged by his or her employer to continue to study. It is essential for the personal development of the individual, that an attitude of striving to improve his position be created in the work force. In the long term the aim should be to encourage mobility, the rotation of duties and so on.
At this point mobility is important, the decentralisation, the creation of industry and the creation of jobs as near as possible to the home base. Career guidance is also essential.
The failure of this Government in all these aspects is something they can never get away from. The projects they have initiated have not been well thought out. There is room for improvement in them and many others on which they could embark if they were only led by somebody who would tell them to do it. Unless we do this, we are facing the type of Ireland that maybe some of these people would like to see, where there are discontented young people. In my opinion our young Irish people are the best people in the world and are deserving of the best support from any Government. I do not want such tripe as was dished up by some of the Ministers here last week on the economic debate about emigration. Fianna Fáil's positive approach through the 'sixties stopped emigration.
