Youth unemployment scars an individual’s employment prospects and places them at greatest risk of a life cycle of joblessness and low income, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said on Thursday.
Speaking as he visited US multinational Salesforce at Leopardstown, Co Dublin, Mr Kenny claimed the country was on course to return to full employment by 2018.
He said unemployment had fallen from 15.1 per cent to about 9 per cent and that the 2018 target would require about 40,000 new jobs a year over coming years.
However, he said, there was “nothing more damaging in the social fabric of our society - or of any country - than tolerating long term youth unemployment”, and he asked how any leader - “in a European sense” could be happy with a situation where as much as 50 per cent of the youth population was unemployed.
Frustration and anger
Such a situation leads to “frustration and anger and cynicism and rage and violence and extremism”, he said.
Commending Safesforce on its internship and training programmes, which he said resulted in 80 per cent of young entrants gaining full time work, Mr Kenny said young people who find themselves unemployed at the start of potential careers were “at the greatest risk of entering a life cycle of joblessness and permanent low income”.
In addition, he said jobless households with children are at a high risk of perpetuating “a cycle of inter-generational joblessness and poverty - and these are cycles that need to be broken”.
Mr Kenny said the State had come a long way to transform what was “a passive and unresponsive welfare system into an active personal engagement-focused employment service”.
“For years in this country, social welfare offices were places where people went to draw free money and sign on, and that was it. Nowadays we have changed all of that,” he said.
Today he said there were about 8,500 young people aged 18 and 19 years who are “stuck” on welfare, and the challenge for Government and wider society was to ensure there was no need for a “direct” path from education to welfare, and that every young person had the opportunity to work and to create a future for themselves.
