Youth unemployment:
Not my own words, but those of Taoiseach Enda Kenny at the Fine Gael ard fheis last year.
I wonder then, in what contempt the Taoiseach and his Government hold young unemployed people in, given the cuts to Jobseeker’s Allowance announced in Tuesday’s budget?
How lazy, how stupid, how unambitious, does he think we are not to want a better life for ourselves?
The cuts are a crude attack on the generation least culpable for creating the unholy mess of a nation we seem set to inherit.
They are an attack on people who, for the most part, desperately want a job — a proper, paid job that acknowledges and rewards their skills.
There are now 66,153 people under the age of 25 on the live register.
The unemployment rate remains atrociously high, at 13.3%, and 32,897 new claimants signed on last month.
Budget 2014 means new claimants under 24 will be capped at €100, with 25-year-olds receiving €144 and those aged 26 and over with €188 per week to look forward to.
The graduated, age-dependent nature of the measures should be no surprise really — by such metrics we can see how the middle-aged policymakers deem themselves to be of greater import than the young people for whom they are supposed to be providing jobs.
There is no denying that some people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance see the dole as an easy way to avoid work and maintain a decent lifestyle — doing whatever it is they do with their lives. They are people that I, my peers, and the population at large, would love nothing more than to see their support withdrawn or dramatically reduced. They are, however, also a minority, and total nowhere near 66,153.
It is at this small cohort of a much larger group that the Government has aimed its myopic cuts.
Nobody expects a magic wand to be waved, bringing an abundance of jobs springing forth from the fragile global economy overnight. What we do expect is that our Government doesn’t denigrate our ambitions in the meantime, but rather treats us with a little more respect than they’ve shown this week.
The only motivation Budget 2014 offers under-26s is for further questioning their future in this country — Michael McGrath’s story of a constituent being offered a list of job opportunities in Canada by the Department of Social Welfare says it all.
Training and re-education measures, of course, have their place in redirecting labour from industries that can no longer accommodate the numbers they once did, but a huge number of people are trained to the hilt and it’s jobs we really need. Many have college degrees; postgraduate and master’s degrees; are former professionals who have been laid off or are skilled and experienced in the trade sector and others.
Education Minister Ruairi Quinn, like the Taoiseach, believes we need to be “more ambitious for our young people”.
Unfortunately, minister, it’s jobs we lack, not ambition.
