On behalf of the Labour Party, I want to acknowledge the Taoiseach's commitment in principle — and indeed that of the Government — to the establishment of a forum which will focus on unemployment in a structured way and which will also have the necessary resources to carry out an urgent investigation of what must be done in a similar manner to that of the New Ireland Forum.
We believe that unemployment must be politicised. By that I do not mean that the political parties should vulgarise themselves by treating unemployment as a party political issue. We must recognise that unemployed people have become demoralised, demotivated and increasingly desperate by the depoliticisation of their plight and the complete failure of the country to respond with constructive measures to help them to return to work.
Unlike some political parties — and in particular some economic commentators from the free market school of economics — we have never accepted the principle that there is an acceptable level of unemployment. A humane, caring and vibrant society must enshrine in its value system the principle of full employment, not as an aspiration but as an objective. Reluctantly, in looking initially at the Fine Gael motion before the House we believe that it is like the curate's egg — good in parts. Indeed the national organisation for the unemployed, in a statement issued today, said:
Fine Gael's Dáil motion, which apparently has the support of the Government, appears to offer just the same half-hearted response. If it is passed as it stands it will waste a golden opportunity. Worse, by using the Forum name in this way, it would become harder to establish the real institution which would offer hope. We call on the Taoiseach to recognise the true value of the forum idea and adopt it in a full and vigorous way because, bluntly, half a forum will be worse than none.
I should, in fairness, say that Deputy Bruton in his contribution has gone some way to clarify the attitude of the Fine Gael Party in relation to including representatives of the unemployed in whatever body emerges.
As far as we are concerned, the fundamental omissions in the Fine Gael motion are the exclusion of any reference to the rights of organisations which represent or seek to defend the interests of unemployed people and those living in poverty or social deprivation to be represented, as of right, in the forum. Secondly, and it comes as no surprise, the Fine Gael motion, in so far as I understand it, and the Government's intention, are to establish a jobs or an employment forum. The nomenclature here is not a matter of mere semantics, it is political. Unless the forum refers specifically to unemployment, their terms of reference and focus will more than likely be on employment creation and will not primarily concentrate on analysis and strategies to reduce unemployment. I want to emphasise this point to the two Ministers present: we have not yet properly addressed the question of managing the labour market in full and dealing with what the Minister for Finance — formerly the Minister for Labour — referred to in his own contribution, the demographic nature of the labour market between now and the end of this century.
It is simply not sufficient to set up a group or another committee which will talk about employment creation. We must look at our labour market and the unemployed, particularly the long term unemployed, and bring forward new measures and methods of intervention which will deal with it. Whatever body emerges in a fortnight's time as a result of the Taoiseach's announcement, if it does not concentrate on that and is simply another variation of a task force or a committee, the Labour Party will not be impressed and will consider it a worthless exercise. To put it bluntly, the Labour Party will not lend their name — never mind their goodwill — to an exercise which in any sense is one of political expediency. I do not believe that is the intention or the motivation of the Taoiseach or indeed the Leader of the Fine Gael Party and I, therefore, ask the Taoiseach and Fine Gael to accept our amendment to include representatives of the unemployed as of right in recognition that such organisations have a valuable contribution to make because they represent the voiceless in our society. Indeed it is a constituency that our President, Mary Robinson, in her campaign for the presidency took upon herself to try to give a voice to during the course of that campaign. It is right that the Oireachtas political parties should play the leading role in a forum on unemployment and employment, which the Labour Party propose.
In the 1989 general election the Labour Party published a policy document which proposed emergency and radical measures to meet the unemployment crisis. Appropriately, it was entitled Jobs and Justice. We spelt out the necessity of changing the way our labour market institutions operate to the detriment of employment through excessive use of voluntary redundancy in profitable enterprises and the need for the unemployed to secure, as a right, a proportion of the normal vacancies which arise in the labour market. Specifically, we indicated that redundancies were wiping out the employment effects of new jobs being created and that vast sums were being spent by major companies on redundancy when redeployment and part-time work should have been available as an alternative to redundancy.
We also put forward a programme to eliminate long term unemployment by involving the Government and the social partners directly in supporting a complete revamping of the employment incentive scheme which would have placed 20,000 unemployed persons in work each year. We proposed that 25 per cent of vacancies arising in the public and private sector should be allocated to those who were 12 months or more out of work. We did not — and we do not— expect employers to carry the cost of such a far-reaching intervention on behalf of the unemployed. We proposed that the subsidy to employers should be doubled in the first year from £60 to £120 per week which, in today's terms, would amount to £132 per week. In the second and third years, payment would be slightly less but not less than £100 per week.
In that document we also identified the structural weakness in over-dependence on overseas industry as a source of retained value added in the Irish economy. The IDA's own data demonstrated that in 1987, while overseas industry sales amounted to £7,580 million, the value added in terms of wages and materials bought in the Irish economy was just under half that, at £3,032 million. By contrast, sales of Irish-owned industry, while lower at £6,966 million, resulted in the sum of £5,601 million in retained value added here, which explains, in a very neat form, the discrepancy between apparent economic growth and very low levels of employment creation. The difference, in reality, amounts to approximately 50,000 jobs in direct manufacturing and another 50,000 jobs indirectly generated from the effect of expenditure in our economy.
I am glad to note that the Culliton report, particularly the supporting consultancy reports, have identified this value-added gap as requiring complete reorientation in our industrial policy. It is of great satisfaction to my party that the Culliton report has vindicated the views which we put forward since the publication of the Telesis report as far back as 1981 and indeed the views expressed by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in their own seminal document, Confronting the Jobs Crisis.
We have made some progress since the days when the howling hyenas and high priests of the new right were identifying Government intervention and expenditure as the core problem of our poor economic performance and the root cause of unemployment. However, the Government — and to some extent the Fine Gael Party — are still partial prisoners of policies which are increasingly being recognised, not only on the left but even by orthodox economic commentators, as a discredited ideology and a bankrupt economic programme.
I welcome signs of discomfort on the Fianna Fáil benches with the tail of Thatcherism which was recently served up to us in the budget. I also welcome the impending demise of the hypnotic trance in which the climatologists have held the Government for a number of years. This would be an indication to the unemployed in particular and also to the Irish electorate that climatology was to be officially discarded and placed with other forms of necromancy and more exotic forms of astrology.