A number of issues need to be addressed on this debate on a jobs forum. The ordinary punter is a casual observer of the political sconce. All I and, I am sure, other Members of the House hear is that the difficulty we experienced over the past two months in getting around the table to discuss this most serious social problem — and it is the most serious social problem, even though other people might be of a different view — does not reflect well on us. That is the point of view being expressed outside this House. Although I do not share Fine Gael views, I respect them. I do not cast them aside. I am very unhappy with the way this committee has been structured. I sympathise with many of the points raised by the main Opposition party here and in the other House and in different debating fora over the past number of weeks. They have made many valid points, the majority of which I agree with. However, it behoves us all to take a reasonable line on this issue. The Government, I always claim, are elected to govern and the Government having taken a decision it must be followed up by the rest of us. Do we go along with it or do we stand outside and snipe at it? That is the problem we are facing.
I spoke on the setting up of the jobs forum at the ICTU conference last July. The forum which I proposed at that time would be the type of forum which the Leader of the main Opposition party has been seeking for the past number of weeks and with which I agree. I regret that we have not set up a committee which goes outside the Oireachtas and that we are not considering a committee which would be drawn from all who have an interest in job creation — the unemployed, organised workers, employers and other various interests. I regret that and I would like that to go clearly on record. I also regret that this is only an advisory committee: they do not have the authority to make decisions, only to make reports. I am on record as having said this almost a year ago, so it is nothing new.
However, the deed is now done. The elected Government have take a certain decision and the question for the rest of us is: what do we do? Do we stay outside or go alone with it? For many politicians this is a serious issue. I do not believe anybody has the magic formula to resolve the unemployment problem here. Therefore there is a major temptation for an Opposition party to stay outside and spend time sniping at the non-effectiveness of the committee. That might be politically attractive. I appeal — and I do not say this in a patronising way — to the Fine Gael Party to look at their difficulties, to register and record them, and to see if this committee can work. Let us give it a chance and then let us not be afraid to say, after the first, second or third report, that this is not working, either because we have not got the resources or because the Government are not listening or because they are not putting into effect the recommendations of the committee.
Outside of the vested interests and the hidden agendas somebody has to take an overall view with one objective in mind — to create sound, real employment. That is not being done at present. In the late eighties there was extraordinary growth in the Irish economy but it did not translate into jobs. That lasted from 1987 to 1991. There was unprecedented growth in the economy, growth which had never been matched previously in the history of the State, but again our economists let us down.
They promised in the mid-eighties that if we got the interest rates right, reduced inflation and increased growth to a significant level, the jobs would flow from that. The jobs did not flow from that and the first question that this committee should examine is what happened to all the wealth created in the late eighties. It did not create new jobs. It did not increase the wealth of workers or increase the tax revenue to any significant extent. We did not have tax growth or jobs. We did not have wealth creation for workers. Somebody made a packet during the late eighties, but it did not translate itself into job opportunities. The Minister or the Government should state whether we will give this committee the teeth to examine such matters.
While we read about gloom and doom in the financial pages of the newspapers and hear from business people that things were never as bad, the figures are different. Exports last year were far beyond what anybody had anticipated; we had very high export levels during the final quarter of 1991; and retail sales during the first part of this year are very high; VAT returns are up again this year — higher than expected pre-budget; tax revenue is higher than was expected the Minister for Finance said in the Dáil last week and there was an increase in wealth during this period.
On the other side, the latest figures show that unemployment has gone up again. Unemployment for this year, which was expected to be 260,000 to 270,000, is now more likely to be 280,000 to 285,000. There are very few facts about demography, but one is certain and, that is, the birth rate has been established so we know the number of people who are coming onto the jobs market every year. At the moment, we are talking about 25,000 to 30,000 people. That is fact and is not open for discussion. The number of jobs we create each year is somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000. It is significant that the Culliton report — I disagree with a lot that is in it — talks about creating 10,000 to 12,000 jobs a year. With 25,000 people coming onto the workforce per year and 10,000 to 12,000 or maybe 15,000 jobs being created unemployment will increase. It is a simple sum. Let us not be surprised when the unemployment figure hits 300,000 by the end of 1993 or early 1994. This inexorable move forward will continue unless we take urgent action. That is why despite my reservations about the non-representative aspect of the jobs forum the fact that it is not a decisionmaking one and, therefore, cannot insist on the implementation of its recommendations, I would still say to every elected public representative that they have the right to query, criticise and enter reservations about the greatest social problem we face.
Unemployment is the greatest social problem we face despite the fact that many people in the media and around the country have other moral issues which are more important to them. The impact of unemployment on families, schools and the infrastructure of the State cannot be estimated. We need to address this problem and public representatives should make every effort to make any facility work in order to create movement in this area.
I agree with Fine Gael's reservations and with what has been pointed out, but I still say give this a try and see how far we get with it. If after the first, second report or third report it is not working, we can do a Grattan's Parliament on it and vote it out of office if that is what is required. We can then point the finger at the Government and say they have failed to deliver and stand indicted. I would be the first to say that. They have been elected to govern and have proposed a jobs forum. Even with all the flaws I see in it, we must attempt to make it work.
It does not reflect my views or the very strong representations made by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to the Government. It is not what congress or the main Opposition parties were looking for. I do not believe the Government have all the wisdom but they have been vested with all the authority of the State. This forum is what they propose and we should give it a chance to work.
Whatever we do regarding the operation of a jobs forum, we must try to focus all the expertise on job creation. There are many people involved, some of them on the fringes of society, some of them in various political parties and different groups ranging from those dealing with poverty, wealth, the unemployed, the employed, the trade unions and the employers. We must all pull together and pool our expertise.
The jobs forum has the power:
to engage the services of persons with specialist or technical knowledge to assist it or any of its subcommittees in their consideration of the matters comprehended by paragraph 1.
I envisage that groups such as the Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed would be asked to make a worthwhile contribution to this committee. I have no doubt that they will have the same reservations about the committee I and Fine Gael expressed. Nevertheless, I cannot see how any group can just walk away from the forum.
One will never see the effects of unemployment in Dublin. The city is too big. I uselessly appealed to this House two weeks ago to try not to sustain the artificial divide which is being created by unscrupulous public representatives between town and city and between east and west. It is too easy for people who have a genuine problem, whether in Shannon or Ballyhaunis, to say it is the people in Dublin who are responsible for that decision. I have seen two towns wrecked by unemployment, where teachers have told of children coming to school crying because their parents do not know where the next salary cheque is coming from or how they are going to live. I saw that happen over the last couple of months in Ballyhaunis. The same happened in Magherafelt, a tiny market town in the North, where 500 or 600 jobs have been lost in the shirt factory this week. That town is destroyed and there is no comeback. No factory in Ballyhaunis or Magherafelt will ever again employ 500 or 600 people. That is the reality.
That is why we need to address these issues in a non-political way if possible. We must try to make this forum work. We must be clear and deliberate about it. We must throw away the baggage of generations and look at our position in Europe. I will not comment on the Maastricht Treaty, but I am conscious of the fact that in the United States, which is the other major trading bloc, people do not think about moving from Dallas to New York for work. We need to look at the opportunities that will be created inside the European Community with or without the Maastricht Treaty.
Last year in Germany 15,000 positions for trainees were not taken up. Should we look for a share in that activity or do we see it as a diminution of our sovereignty and neutrality if we look for jobs in other parts of the Community? It is all right to sell to the Community but not to work within the Community? These are the real issues we must address, despite the fact that every time we say it somebody will say, "there is another politician who sees emigration as the answer to our problem". I am not saying that. What I am saying is that Air Rianta can run duty free airports in Moscow and various parts of Europe. In those cases we are selling a service to those countries and we can continue to do that in a way no other country in Europe can because we have one major disadvantage and one major advantage, both tied to each other. The disadvantage is that we have almost the highest level of unemployment in the European Community and that creates an advantage in that we have a workforce ready to take up employment. Two other things flow from that.
We have the population profile which allows us to take advantage of employment opportunities wherever they come from. Employment is of its nature age specific. One does not retrain a 45 year old general operative or labourer to be a stockbroker. One does not take somebody who is burned out in the money market at age 35 and retrain them to work on a building site. Those are two extreme examples but the point is the same: people do not train to be a teacher at age 50 or 60, they do it between the ages of 19 and 22. Employment opportunities are age specific. It is not that people of a particular age are unemployable but there are certain perceptions of the age at which people engage in employment opportunities.
We have the best population profile in the European Community and we can use that. We also have a highly educated population. This brings me to one of the problems I have with the thinking in the Culliton report, which has been overtaken by developments around the world. It is the view that one moves from education into the training area, that one trains people for jobs and that is the answer to the unemployment problem. The thinking in many of the major trading blocs is changing for a variety of reasons.
The best example I could give is in the computer industry. Somebody aged 60 who began work in the computer industry at age 20, would now be retrained for the fifth time to deal with the fifth generation of computers. A computer that would have filled this room 40 years ago would now fit into the palm of my hand. In order to keep up with that level of change, what is needed is not somebody who was trained 40 years ago but somebody who can be trained and retrained. If our education system is to service the needs of industry and employment, it does not need to product people who are trained to do specific tasks but rather people who are adaptable, flexible and have the potential to be trained and retrained a number of times during their career, at manual, blue collar, white collar, managerial or professional level. It does not matter whether one is a dentist or a computer operative, things will change.
There was not even a FAX machine or a word processor in this House six years ago. A person who was specifically trained in shorthand typing nine years ago and got a job in this House would now be dealing with a level of equipment which was not in existence then. We need people who are flexible, who can be retrained and are able to deal with changes in society. The large corporations in America are no longer looking for marketing graduates or business studies graduates because they have learned that if they take somebody with a good general education who is bright and adaptable they can teach them the skills they need in a few months. Then they can retrain them at a later stage if that becomes necessary. The people who are offered jobs in the large corporations in the US at the moment have good, solid, old fashioned general degrees. I am not saying that as an unalterable fact but to indicate that there are changes and that we need to look at how we respond to them and exploit any opportunities they create.
Our population profile is such as to enable us to have our people at the top of every large corporation, major industry and political movement in Europe within one generation. It is a matter of taking advantage of that fact and casting aside our insular or parochial views. We must take advantage of the new Europe, exploit it on behalf of this country and bring wealth from Europe into this country. He must insist that Brussels, does not become a vessel which will retain all the wealth of Europe. We must look at practical issues and note that any business or professional person going from Ireland to Brussels in the morning will pay an exhorbitant cost for doing so.
We must be realistic and note that by the end of this calendar year we will be the only island state member of the European Community. We must recognise that when the initial plans for a rapid rail network for Europe was put together it included an under-sea link from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead. That does not appear on any maps or plans I have seen recently. Because of our geographic position and the fact that we will soon be the only island nation in the EC, it costs our citizens much more than our competitors to travel and sell on the European mainland. We need to look at that.
The question was raised here today in a different context about the need to look at Iarnród Éireann. A new rapid rail system is being created in Europe that it will now be quicker to go by rail from Paris to Brussels than to fly taking into account the amount of time spent travelling from one airport to another and then into the centre of the city. We are not getting any of that action. In the west the rail transport is disgraceful and the only people who are shouting about it are politicians from the west. That should be the concern of all politicians who want to create opportunities in this country.
We need to pull together the specialist knowledge available in the employment area. We need to look at the work of organisations like FÁS and to see how that ties into employment creation. We need to ensure that the FÁS projects will be useful in terms of job creation. We must look at the different areas in this country. There was an old fashioned notion that the only way to create jobs was through manufacturing industry; that is not the case. I heard Senator Raftery talk on a number of occasions, and indeed be shouted down, about the development of Irish agriculture.
There are some points with which I would agree and some with which I would disagree but I am one of the few people in this House who maintain that the Common Agricultural Policy is costing us jobs and depressing agriculture, and the sooner it is changed the better. There has been a slight softening in that regard on the Government side of the House because they have been told to do so by their political masters. I was one of the few people who agreed with Commissioner MacSharry when he said it first. Nobody said anything last year. People were ready to bury him when he first said it. It is significant that this week a small meat company in Kilbeggan, Tara Meats, was given the Irish standard ISO——
