Youth Unemployment Dail Éireann — 2026-01-15 ============================================================ Neale Richmond (FG), Dublin Rathdown I am grateful to Deputy O'Reilly for raising this important issue. While I am taking it on behalf of the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, it is one I have a personal interest in. We spent many a day on this topic in the previous Dáil. As the Deputy will know, the programme for government sets out a strong enterprise and fiscal framework prioritising economic and employment growth, with a target of creating 300,000 extra jobs by 2030. I am pleased to report that Ireland's labour market continues to perform strongly with record employment of over 2.8 million people last year, rising participation and sustained growth. For clarity there are more people at work today in Ireland than the population of Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. This reflects the resilience of the economy and the success of Government policies supporting job creation, fostering innovation and providing opportunities across sectors. Skills and talent are in high demand with near full employment and continued growth in ICT, pharmaceuticals, medtech, financial services and agrifood driven by both indigenous firms and foreign direct investment providing opportunities for young people to begin exciting careers. All the research in the past week from three or four different bodies showed that the Irish workforce and population is now either the fourth or second most educated workforce in the world. While unemployment edged up to 5% in December, it remains broadly consistent with full employment. As the Deputy rightly points out, the youth unemployment rate reached 14% in December at 50,700 persons, which is below the EU average of 15.2% and euro area average of 14.8%. As everyone would accept, I think it is not unusual for youth unemployment rates to be higher than those of older cohorts, due to a lack of relevant work experience among younger workers, skills mismatches or difficulties experienced moving between education and employment, with clear seasonal and demographic patterns. This is nothing new in that regard. However, many of these factors are temporary in nature. As young people widen their professional networks and gain broader work and life experience, their employment prospects improve. The Deputy raised an action plan. It is a valid point and anybody in this Chamber can work on these things. It does not need to be party political. As she will be aware, in May 2024, the then Minister, Heather Humphreys, and the Minister, Deputy Burke, launched the updated Pathways to Work Strategy, which included a number of initiatives to reduce youth unemployment and the employment and youth engagement charter, an initiative to support and inspire young jobseekers and other marginalised groups to build their knowledge, skills and experience to enhance their employability. The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment and its agencies will continue promoting employer awareness and encourage uptake of supports such as the expanded JobsPlus subsidy scheme and the work placement experience programme. The Department will continue to work closely with the Department of Social Protection to implement revised Pathways to Work actions and to develop the successor strategy, which will support jobseekers to find and maintain quality employment. The Deputy alluded to the anecdotal experiences of many families at Christmas, which I do not dispute. In my new role as Minister of State with responsibility for diaspora, I have spent the past seven months extensively engaging with the Irish abroad. Some have been abroad for generations and some only recently. There is this notion that people are fleeing Ireland because there are no jobs, which was certainly the case when I left university when we were in the grips of the financial crash. We need to knock that on the head. There is a great opportunity to emigrate and move abroad but when we look at the category of people who came back to Ireland last year, we see over 30,000 Irish people returning after an experience abroad. We talk about housing and destinations such as Canada and Australia. The biggest issues there are the affordability and availability of housing with average prices in rental terms in cities such as Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver and Sydney all ahead of Dublin. It is important that we play fair. This is an issue. I am not denying it is an issue. It is an issue being experienced by other European partners. We have a strategy in place and we are more than happy to work with the Opposition to make sure that it is fit for purpose and that we listen to those canaries in the coalmine the Deputy alluded to. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-15