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Youth Guarantee

Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 28 May 2013

Tuesday, 28 May 2013

Questions (426)

Peadar Tóibín

Question:

426. Deputy Peadar Tóibín asked the Minister for Social Protection the provisions that she is making to ensure that employment creation and retention forms part of any youth guarantee scheme. [24442/13]

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Written answers

The EU Council Recommendation on a Youth Guarantee received political agreement at the EPSCO Council meeting on 28 February 28 and was formally adopted by the Council last month. The Recommendation is that Member States should: "Ensure that all young people under the age of 25 years receive a good-quality offer of employment, continued education, an apprenticeship or a traineeship within a period of four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education."

While it is recommended that the guarantee should be implemented as soon as possible, it is recognised that implementation will be more gradual in the Member States experiencing the most severe budgetary difficulties and higher rates of youth unemployment. The government will now review the current range of youth employment policies in Ireland to assess what measures will need to be taken to commence the gradual implementation of the guarantee.

With regard to job creation for youth in support of the guarantee, the Government’s primary strategy to tackle youth unemployment is to create the environment for a strong economic recovery by promoting competitiveness and productivity. Economic recovery will underpin jobs growth. Past experience suggests that youth unemployment, which tends to rise relatively rapidly in a downturn, can be expected to fall relatively rapidly during the recovery. The government’s job-creation policies are outlined in the Action Plan for Jobs, which sets out a target for 100,000 net new jobs to be created by 2016, many of which will be filled by young people. Under the updated Action Plan for 2013, a new recruitment incentive – JobsPlus – has also been developed by my Department and was approved by the Government. This incentive will cover the cost of c. €1 in every €4 of an employer’s wage costs and will be launched for availability by July 2013. Young people are likely to be major beneficiaries of this initiative as employers tend to hire young people when there is a recovery in employment. This incentive will be launched for availability by July 2013.

The scale and nature of any additional measures required will depend on the trend in youth unemployment, and in particular the number of young people likely to experience periods of unemployment of more than four months under current policies. In this context, it is a welcome development that the official labour market figures published by the CSO recently indicated that the number of young unemployed at the end of 2012, at 59,000, a reduction of almost 9,000 on the same time a year earlier. It is to be hoped that this is the beginning of a sustained downward movement in youth unemployment as the economy recovers. Even so, the implementation of a guarantee will, almost certainly require an expansion in the range of opportunities currently on offer to young people in the form of further education and training, internships, subsidised private-sector recruitment, and supports for self-employment. In this regard the State already provides a significant number of initiatives which are of relevance to young people and the Department of Social Protection took steps in Budget 2013 to increase funding and places for schemes such as JobBridge, Community Employment, TÚS and a new state employment scheme in the local Government sector. In total an additional 10,000 places will be provided.

The size and the timescale for any additional provision, over and above that outlined above that is both desirable and feasible will be established over the coming months.

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