Deputy B. Ahern has been given permission to raise on the Adjournment the operation of the social employment scheme. The Deputy has 20 minutes or very near it.
Adjournment Debate. - Social Employment Scheme.
Although I noticed that the Minister for Labour is not present, I shall proceed.
The reason Fianna Fáil wish to raise this matter on the Adjournment of the House is mainly because of the failure of the system to afford one an opportunity, throughout the year to question the Minister for Labour with regard to his scheme outlined in the document Building on Reality, 1985-1987. Because of the Question Time programme the Minister for Labour has not answered questions in this House since 1982, as far as I am aware, and certainly not since I became Opposition Spokesman on Labour.
Now that the Minister has appeared I apologise to him for bringing him in at such a late hour. I was making the point that, under the Question Time programme, the Minister has not answered questions since I became Opposition Spokesman on Labour.
The Deputy can blame the Minister who has just left for having changed the custom.
In the document Building on Reality 1985-1987, issued at the very beginning of the parliamentary year, the Government made great play of the importance of employment. I might quote from page 25 paragraph 1.26, under the heading “Unemployment”, which reads as follows:
The underlying increase in the numbers out of work has slowed steadily since early 1983, judging from the Live Register data. However, the increase in the Live Register is the net difference between flows on and off it. These gross flows, which are considerable by comparison with the net changes, reveal a significant level of activity in the labour market. For example, during 1983 there were almost 206,000 movements on to the Register and 178,000 movements off it. In the first six months of 1984, the net increase of 7,000 in the Live Register was the result of over 106,000 inflows and over 99,000 outflows.
On page 83 of that same document there is a heading "A New Social Employment Scheme" which was then laid out in detail. Throughout the year we supported the Minister and the Government in that effort, although we regarded it as unsatisfactory, since it gave no sustainable employment and did not form part of any coherent manpower policy. Certainly it had nothing to do with an agricultural or industrial policy but rather was devised as a way of affording young people an opportunity to engage in short term employment by way of convincing them that something was being done to satisfy their needs.
On this, now the last parliamentary day of the current session, I want to place on the record the total failure of the employment and unemployment policies outlined in that document. The plan was to create 10,000 jobs, the money being made available, the goal being to achieve a participation level of 10,000 within the year. It is now almost a year since that national plan was announced. In spite of all our support, nothing really happened until January last. There were no meaningful negotiations with anybody.
On the basis of parliamentary questions answered on 25 June and again today the lack of success of the scheme is demonstrated. We are told that there are at present 323 persons employed by local authorities on 16 projects. That was the information given in answer to a question in the House today. There is just a handful of local authorities involved. For example, we were told that Wexford County Council have employed 111 people with most other local authorities employing fewer right down to Waterford County Council which employ only eight. The Dublin figures are not issued——
The Cork figures are not there.
We have had Cork for most of this evening.
In answer to a parliamentary question on 25 June last we were told that the target for the first year was 10,000 jobs while to date the number of jobs approved is in excess of 2,300 involving 300 projects. The scheme has amounted to a major con game, a major failure. We are now asking the Minister for Labour what policy the Government have with regard to unemployment. It should be remembered there is now widespread emigration. Anybody who examines the statistics now emanating from the Central Statistics Office will see that as a fact. Last week there were people here from the United States who clearly stated that they had not even been asked by this Government to involve themselves in any way to assist those unemployed people. In recent weeks I met a number of agencies in London, Birmingham and Manchester involved in dealing with the thousands of young people emigrating to the United Kingdom. Accepting that fact, examination of the June figures shows that unemployment of young people is rapidly increasing. If the Minister for Labour has any integrity — of which I believe he has much — he will tell this House tonight that the programme contained in the document Building on Reality 1985-1987 has failed totally as far as unemployment is concerned, that the scheme was a sham, contains many ambiguous regulations and is not operational, so that the money provided almost a year ago should now be diverted to some other scheme. Any jobs provided have been of an unsustainable, temporary nature, mostly involved in environmental work schemes.
The Minister should be aware that he is one of the key members of the Cabinet with regard to the implementation of the schemes outlined in the national plan, the gospel of this Government, and which has failed totally. We are now almost at the end of the seventh month of the financial year and national finances show clearly how serious is the problem. We want to know from the Minister if he holds out any hope of improvement, or will he accept that what he has done to date has failed totally? After almost three years in office this Government have no credible policy by way of helping young people, providing them with a future, whether by way of temporary or part time jobs. They have no concrete proposals whatsoever and those contained in the national plan outlined by them have failed miserably.
Local authorities are not implementing the employment schemes outlined in that document and the Department of Labour, even in their best endeavours, have failed. We would ask the Minister at least to spend the recess period endeavouring to convince his colleagues that, when a financial crisis arises somewhere, they should not take the easy option by way of costly redundancies instead of being innovative and creating sustainable jobs. If those policies are continued there is no future for this country.
On page 26 of Building on Reality 1985-1987, Table 1-2 “Main Features of Projections, Employment and Unemployment” it was projected that over the lifetime of that national plan unemployment would rise from 209,000 to 210,000. I know this or any other Minister is beyond embarrassment with regard to such figures, but I must emphasise that those projections have now become irrelevant, that the statistics contained in the document are now totally irrelevant. I am not interested in that. I am interested in the fact that almost 70,000 young people a year are coming on to the labour market and we have failed to provide a future for them or even credible policies that might work. The social employment scheme which was to provide 10,000 jobs has failed.
I intend to give my colleague, our spokesman on Education, Deputy O'Rourke some of my time to highlight where the scheme has failed. In reply to questions on the last day of the session we were told that only 300 people were employed in this short term employment scheme by local authorities who were meant to be the great initiators in the scheme. Will the Minister at least spend his summer, apart from his annual leave, trying to convince his colleagues, industry and employers that the unemployment situation is causing unbelievable hardship to thousands of families and that it cannot continue. The Government should do something about unemployment and not just offer glib statements about seasonable adjustments of figures. We have waited until the end of the term and we now ask the Minister to do something about it in the short term. Because of the policies being pursued by the Government nothing can be done for long term unemployment as long as this Government last.
When I spoke on Building on Reality last October I described the social employment scheme as imaginative. I outlined the scheme for the canal in Mullingar and in Westmeath. Ten months on, my hopes for this scheme are completely dashed by the figures that have been produced tonight and also because of my experience of those schemes. It was envisaged that 10,000 persons would be employed under this scheme this year at a cost of £29 million. We are into the month of July now and not even a quarter of the potential of that scheme has been realised.
There are anomalies and shortcomings in these schemes and even at this late stage I would ask the Minister to rectify these discrepancies. I know that County Westmeath has achieved a minimal amount of employment through the scheme. At present interviews are being conducted in Athlone through the Manpower offices for a major scheme on the Shannon. This will not work out because the qualification to obtain employment is that a person must be over 25 and unemployed for over 12 months. Despite three calls on the local labour exchange for suitable persons the numbers qualified have been very low. If applicants under this scheme are to be offered a job they are asked if they are the holders of a medical card, are they in receipt of free footwear, free butter or free milk. It is appalling that these questions are being asked. I never thought we would be back to the days when people built roads to nowhere and useless statues just for the sake of giving people work. I had thought the scheme imaginative and that it would benefit the environment and the community.
Last Thursday a young man who fulfilled the qualifications visited me in my house. He had an asthmatic medical problem for which he had been granted a medical card. His medical problem would not interfere with him working. The man had decided not to take employment under the scheme for fear that he would lose his medical card. The whole scheme fell to ashes before my eyes. When I came to Dublin I spoke to Deputy Ahern about it and we decided that we must do something to have this exposed by the end of the week.
Will the Minister give us an assurance that such questions will not be asked in future. I fail to see where that is in the spirit of the scheme. However long it takes, the health authorities will link up with some other authorities and if employed under this scheme that young man would lose his medical card. That is my main purpose in raising this question to night. I am convinced by the Minister's expression that he was not aware that this sort of thing was happening. The Minister should immediately do something about it. The scheme was sold as a massive PR exercise. The people were invited to meetings at which they were told how exciting and dynamic the scheme would be and what a great benefit it would be to the community.
An imaginative scheme has been put forward by the Athlone UDC and the Westmeath County Council which would work on the banks of the Shannon for a considerable period. There are difficulties in obtaining the workers because of the difficulties I have outlined — the fact that a person must be over 25, unemployed for over 12 months and so on. I would ask the Minister to broaden the parameters of the persons available for work by lowering the age limit and reducing the number of months a person will have been unemployed. I would also ask the Minister to eliminate the insulting and discriminatory questions that are being asked. This reminds of when I became spokesperson for Education and the medical cards became a cause célébre with the issuing of free transport tickets. I do not like the idea that one can go into any CIE office which runs a school transport service and on a computer a child's name will be shown beside the number of her mother or father's medical card. I always understood that the issuing of medical cards was a matter for health boards only and that it was not for other personnel of other Departments to know the people in receipt of free health care.
The social employment scheme has been a failure. Much of the failure has to do with the limitations which the Minister's Department put upon the persons who might wish to apply for those schemes. Failure arises as a result of the degrading treatment of people. They are asked what their entitlement is. When they are asked if they have a medical card or this, that or the other the implicit follow on from that is they are going to be whipped from them, although that is not stated. On that basis I wish to add my voice to that of our spokesman on Labour here to night to ask the Minister to do something about unemployment. This scheme has potential but the potential is not realised.
First of all, let me put on record, if the official reporters have not yet picked it up, my apologies to the House for not being here at the start of this Adjournment debate.
I recognise the constructive spirit in which this matter has been raised. In the short time available I want to try to reply in the spirit in which the matter has been raised by both Deputies opposite. I want to put the facts into the record in addition to the facts that have already been elicited by way of parliamentary question. I have here an internal management sheet dated 5 July which indicates that, the number of participants on the projects actually working is 567, of whom 297 or 52 per cent are in the public sector and 48 per cent in the voluntary sector. I will talk in terms of participants or potential employees rather than individual projects. The total number of potential jobs which the monitoring committee have cleared and which are now waiting for the sponsors, be they local authority, public authority or voluntary, is 2,912. Projects coming through the system ready for clearance within the Department are another 2,590, all in all 6,069. They are the numbers.
I do not accept that the scheme has been a failure. I am disappointed in its takeup to date and I accept some of the criticisms that have been lodged here tonight in the spirit in which they have been offered. My intention is to respond to the exhortations of Deputy Ahern and Deputy O'Rourke regarding the improvement of the operation of the scheme.
Why has the takeup been as slow as apparently it has been? There are administrative problems which we have to sort out for which I am not blaming anybody else. This is by way of explanation rather than excuse. We are responsible and they will be sorted out. The takeup in some sectors has been much slower than we would have thought. We had an information-publicity campaign around the country. Rather than preaching to people we travelled around and tried to answer questions on the ground in about eight venues. There were difficulties in people not being available when they were approached. They were not interested in the work because from their point of view the marginal benefit was not worth the effort. In so far as we can form any judgment or evaluation of it, in Deputy O'Rourke's area approximately 500 people were contacted by the NMS office in that area and the response in terms of people who came in and expresed an interest was of the order of 40.
Because of what I said.
These are people who came in, who expressed an interest.
Yes, but the word has got around that people lose their medical cards.
Well, that is not to answer the Deputy's question in her contribution to this Adjournment debate. It is not in the spirit of what we are trying to do. Over 100,000 people are on unemployment assistance. By definition the vast majority of those people have been unemployed for more than a year. My belief, which I think is shared by everybody in this House, is that many of them are single and getting far less than £70 a week; and of the 100,000 the vast majority of them want, as everybody in this House wants, more income than they are getting currently. More to the point and more poignant, they want activity — some kind of a job that they can stand over.
There are at least 10,000 jobs that can be done. For example, in the educational infrastructure we can think of caretakers and clerical assistants. With the co-operation of the teaching unions in the national primary school system in particular we have identified 800 jobs which we expect will be taken up in the academic year commencing in September. A number of local authorities have disappointed me in their slowness in responding to the scheme, and I invite Deputy Ahern as leader of the Fianna Fáil group on Dublin Corporation to look actively at how the scheme can be applied in the area of Dublin Corporation. The large urban areas are the slowest to respond to this kind of scheme, be it through the public authorities or voluntary organisations. We get applications from relatively small, isolated rural communities whose problem in terms of unemployment is less than it is in the greater Dublin area in every sense of the word. I suggest that Deputy Ahern raise this matter with all the other councillors in Dublin Corporaction. I recognise the presence in the House of Deputy De Rossa of The Workers' Party who is also a member of Dublin Corporation.
We are setting up an action committee to move the officials on that.
The Deputy is a member of that authority and I am not going to engage in a debate. I set out to give an explanation rather than an excuse. We are accepting full responsibility for the operation of the scheme. We have been disappointed at the response in the takeup from some local authorities, not all.
I do not regard the scheme to be a failure, to use the phrase that Deputy O'Rourke used. I am personally disappointed at the response to date. We have identified certain administrative problems which we can unravel and we are in the process of unravelling them. It is not fair to say that it is virtually a year since the scheme was decided upon, although I know that is a debating point. It was publicised in the plan Building on Reality and designed to start on 1 January 1985, not before that. I am confident that we can still reach the target of 10,000 people on the scheme by the end of this guaranteed year and I am committed to working to achieve that.
We support that.
I know the Deputy supports it, and the constructive support he has offered to date enables me to feel that the target is reasonable. The public sector, the public infrastructure — because the trade unions, the monitoring group, are an integral part of this process — have co-operated on the scheme despite their initial reservations about the displacement effect it might have on some areas of employment. On Monday last at the most recent meeting of the monitoring committee we cleared a number of projects and potential participants.
In conclusion, the scheme is designed to provide employment for those people who are on long term unemployment as an alternative to simply paying people out of the Exchequer who have exhausted insurance contributions which they made, paying them for doing nothing when most of them want to do something, and a great deal of work can and should be done around the country. I recognise the manner in which the two Opposition Deputies have raised this matter. I understand the motivation and the constructive way in which they have put their points.
In relation to the exhoration from Deputy Ahern, he can rest assured that we are already working to improve the administration of the scheme and streamline it, because we have been dissatisfied with the response to date. I will in particular make inquiries about the points raised by Deputy O'Rourke and I will write to her formally and clarify them or get some kind of indication, because as the House is adjourning tomorrow we will not have an opportunity in this House for the next three months to respond.
Will the Minister guarantee that the questions will cease?
I will. I am appalled that they are put in this way. I do not really know what is happening. I am not doubting the Deputy's word. I will clarify the matter and communicate with her in a constructive way.
Proinsias De Rossa
May I ask a question?
You may ask a question.
Proinsias De Rossa
I have been in touch with Dublin Corporation a number of times about the scheme and they informed me that the reason they cannot get the scheme off the ground is that they have not been able to satisfy the trade union representation that permanent jobs will not be at risk as a result of commencing this scheme. Can the Minister tell me that that is no longer a problem or is he taking steps to deal with it?
Dublin Corporation are in a position no different from that of any other local authority regarding their ability to communicate with the unions. If other local authorities have been able to reach amicable arrangements with the trade unions who have a legitimate interest in this matter I cannot see why Dublin Corporation cannot do the same.
The Dáil adjourned at 12.30 a.m. on Thursday, 11 July 1985 until 10.30 a.m. on Thursday, 11 July 1985.