Charles Flanagan
Ceist:12 Mr. Flanagan asked the Minister for Enterprise and Employment the targeted reduction which he plans to achieve in the numbers of long term unemployed over the next five years.
Ceisteanna—Questions Oral Answers - Long-Term Unemployment.
The whole purpose of Government policy in relation to enterprise and employment is to achieve the maximum increase in employment levels and in this way to reduce the numbers of the unemployed, including long term unemployment. There is no level of long term unemployment which can be regarded as acceptable.
Government policy seeks to promote economic growth and to increase the employment intensity of that growth in order to maintain employment and create new jobs. In addition, a range of active labour market measures to improve access to the labour market and jobs and to develop job-related skills is pursued by the Government.
A measure of particular relevance to tackling long term unemployment is community employment. The target is to have 40,000 participants on the programme by the end of 1994. This is a significant increase on current levels of participation on programmes which operated prior to the launch of community employment on 11 April 1994.
The employment incentive and enterprise schemes also assist the long term unemployed. In the area of training, a special emphasis is given to accommodate the long term unemployed on FÁS training courses. A range of other measures operated under the aegis of the Department of the Taoiseach and the Department of Social Welfare includes, respectively, local development initiatives and the back to work allowance scheme. I recognise that long term unemployment will continue to represent a major challenge over the coming years and I believe the approach the Government is taking is the correct one.
Is the Minister aware that long term unemployment has consistently increased since this Government returned to office? Is he aware that the ESRI recently published a projection for the next five years — which took into account the National Development Plan — in which it indicated that long term unemployment would remain at its present level of 130,000? Does he recognise that implicit in that projection is a serious criticism of the inability of the existing strategy to reduce long term unemployment, despite the huge once-off injection of EC money? Would the Minister agree that when in Opposition he and his party indicated that they had the capacity to reduce long term unemployment to 25,000? What has happened to their policies since then?
I accept the accuracy of the Deputy's statistics. Perhaps he should have added that since I came to office the numbers on the live register have been reduced by 13,000. It is sad that the longer somebody is off the pitch, so to speak, the less likely they are to get a game. Members who participated in the Oireachtas Committee on Employment will be aware that even though there is an upturn in economic activity, with many people on unemployment benefit getting jobs and many coming into the labour market for the first time — a former leader of the Deputy's party wrote very extensively last Saturday about the good news facing young school leavers in this respect — the residual problem is with the long term unemployed. Nobody in Europe has a menu of answers that specifically addresses this problem. We are probably more advanced than most, which is as it should be because our problem is greater than most.
We are currently working on various initiatives. In reply to an earlier question from Deputy Finucane I stated that in getting more specific profiled information on the long term unemployed, through the Department of Social Welfare, we will be enabled to tailor effective and inexpensive measures to deal with this problem. I would say in all sincerity — I am not making a party political point — that this is perhaps the one residual major economic problem that is a contradiction of all the other things happening in society at present. This is not unique to Ireland; it is part and parcel of the European problem. While we can develop solutions here — we are currently doing so in the Department — they will have to be validated and extended across the European Union and we will have to get European assistance to resolve the problem.