Employment Data
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-13
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Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown

I encourage the Minister of State to go beyond the numbers and talk to young people herself. The young people I speak to tell me about the difficulties they have in finding employment. Beyond the statistics that the Minister of State is setting out, we have to simply acknowledge this.
As I mentioned, and as we know from history repeating itself, it is a canary in the coal mine. We know it is an indicator of a broader concern across unemployment. We know there has been an erosion in the quality of the work that is offered, particularly to younger people and other cohorts within our population. When I raise workers’ rights, the approach of this Government has been that job creation is enough, and we should be grateful that people have jobs in the first place. In a time of economic prosperity, where we are talking about the strength of our economy, our balance sheet and our enterprises, it is depressing not to see that translate to workers. Is cúis mhór imní anseo. A booming economy is cold comfort to people who cannot participate in that economy. Record corporation profits do not continue on to our society if companies are not employing people, if they treat their workers as disposable and if they do not provide quality jobs. What is the Government doing to tackle those issues head-on?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-13