The Fine Gael leader, Mr Bruton, has dismissed the Tanaiste's Employment Action Plan as mere repackaging of existing proposals. Certainly there are no significant extra resources being made available to the various agencies tackling the problem. But Ms Harney's proposals do represent a significant change of direction in how those resources should be applied.
The emphasis in the plan is on "prevention rather than cure", to use Ms Harney's own words. There is to be a "major reorientation", from services for the older, long-term unemployed towards the younger, short-term unemployed. With the reorientation of resources it is planned to ensure that every unemployed person under 25 who is out of work for more than six months is offered some form of training, work practice, a job or "other employability measure".
This approach reflects the dominant new school of thought within the EU on how unemployment should be tackled. Some EU member states - particularly Austria and Sweden, which seem to be driving the current debate - are experiencing alarming increases in youth unemployment. But in Ireland the priority identified in numerous reports over the past decade has been long-term unemployment. Nowhere in the text of the action plan is a convincing case made for abandoning this strategy.
There are, of course, strong economic and social arguments for switching available resources into combating youth unemployment. The evidence shows that once a person mounts a rung on the employment ladder, however lowly, they have a chance of achieving greater things. Young people are more adaptable and readily trained. Because many of them live at home, they are also more likely to take low paid jobs that their parents might refuse on the grounds that they don't provide a living wage.
Employers are crying out for young staff in the low-pay sector and there are certainly jobs to be filled there. There is also the prospect of a national minimum wage of £4.40p an hour by 2000. That may prove a problem. If the Tanaiste and the social partners all accept that £4.40p is the least anyone should work for, many of these young people may prove reluctant to work for less.
The action plan does include proposals to phase in the long-term unemployed to its programme in the years ahead, but what happens to them in the meantime? These people are in many cases heads of households and there is a strong correlation between families headed by an unemployed person and the incidence of poverty. There is growing evidence that these families and the communities where they are concentrated will drift further to the margins if resources are diverted elsewhere.
Some of the measures urgently needed to help them are not that costly. For instance, a quota of long term unemployed could be included in FAS job-skill programmes. At present, only 13 per cent of participants are long-term unemployed and the proportion is falling.