IN Europe today unemployment affects more than 20 million women and men, and more than 50 million of our fellow citizens have an income lower than the threshold of poverty.
This crisis is not difficult to explain. It is a straightforward crisis of capitalism. This is an astonishingly successful system, which generates very rapid technical advances, and a superabundance of material goods.
But it also generates great concentrations of wealth and power which, of course, imply acute maldistribution of resources. The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer. So the economists soon tell us that we have a problem of insufficient demand.
For many years after the second World War, we earned how to manage this maldistribution, using Keynesian methods. Keynesian techniques were ethical, and they resulted in a dramatic recovery, which greatly strengthened the globalisation of capital.
But the resultant growth of the multinationals undermined the economic powers of the nation state and ultimately made Keynesian demand management impossible. So we return to face the old contradictions. That our societies are richer is beyond doubt. But this only makes more unacceptable the miseries by which we are surrounded.
Since its inception at the beginning of July, the Irish Presidency of the European Union has consistently emphasised the importance of employment questions as a key priority for its period of tenure.
This locus sharply reflects growing public concern about unemployment throughout much of the Union. Now, more than 500 parliamentarians around Europe have endorsed the European Appeal for Full Employment, initiated by me in the European Parliament and I prepared the parliament's two major reports on employment.
The initial signatories of the appeal come from every national parliament, as well as the European Parliament itself. They include 17 TDs and four Irish MEPs, among them Mr John Hume. New names arrive daily, and the appeal is open for public endorsement.
Many individuals working within the European institutions have done everything they could to institute measures to promote economic recovery and the creation of jobs. But judged as a whole, the European institutions have failed to accomplish these aims, as everyone can plainly see.
The Delors White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness acid Employment of 1993 raised many hopes. But most of these have been dashed. Far from generating 15 million new jobs by the end of the century, to halve the level of unemployment, no employment has been continuously rising.
But this problem has not proved susceptible to action within the member states. Even Germany, the most powerful economy of all, seems impotent to prevent the increase of unemployment to the four million mark and beyond. Indeed, cuts in public expenditure aggravate the problem rather than easing it.
Twice, the European Parliament has voted by very large majorities to implement the Delors White Paper. But the Council of Ministers, and above all Ecofin, have ignored these decisions. Some individual ministers have tried to emphasise - some of the measures proposed in the parliament's reports, and in the White Paper. But the council remains obdurate.
IT WAS precisely the stalemate that followed parliament's two decisions on the need for a coherent strategy for employment that persuaded me that only an informed public opinion could persuade governments to act properly.
The European Appeal for Full Employment has attracted signatures in every national parliament, in an immense range of trade unions, among the churches, and in every walk of academic and cultural lite.
More and more people are aware that on societies are seriously undermined by the exclusion of millions of unemployed people. Nobody is free in a regime of mass unemployment.
The direct victims are forced into poverty and distress. Not only do they lack resources, but many lose all hope of recovering a decent livelihood. Families break up, and suicides all too often result.
But even the employed lose their freedom: when there are 20 or 100 people queueing for every single job, wages can be cut, insecurity become general, and trade unions are profoundly undermined. The working population itself discovers that its rights are all in jeopardy.
The one thing that gas enabled governments to drift into this desperate situation is the perception that unemployment is some kind of natural calamity, like storms fires or floods. It is not. It is a social creation: something that the British Archbishop William Temple once called "the mark of a diseased society".
If our people realised that they had the remedy in their own hands, then politicians, whether national or European, would be compelled to change their attitudes.
That is why I think it is necessary to launch a direct appeal to public opinion. Everybody can see that there is an immense range of opinion ready to insist on full employment.
How shall we carry on our work? I hope to convene a great meeting between elected representatives and the direct spokespeople of the unemployed and the victims of unemployment. I should like this meeting to be held in Brussels in the new hemicycle of the European Parliament. I think it could be widely representative.
If it succeeds it can launch a major initiative to network all the organisations and individuals concerned about the problem, and to help them to develop a common voice, powerful enough to enough to overrule those politicians who prefer a divided society.
I want to extend the discussion on these issues to every part of our society, including those parts which are normally excluded from the discussion. Socially, exclusion affects people without jobs, homes, incomes or rights. But politically, exclusion affects many other groups, whose ideas are not considered in the conventional debate.
We have already succeeded in encouraging many groups to speak out. But we have much more to do, in the churches, in local communities, and in the schools and universities in which new generations of unemployed are receiving instruction. If they will join together, they will be able to generate the hope which is necessary to ensure that such instruction becomes useful.
All these groups can contribute, and I hope they will. They have a great deal to teach us.