I thank the Ceann Comhairle. Any young person unfortunate enough to be watching this spectacle on a flat-screen television or a black and white portable might be somewhat shocked to see the leader of the country before us failing to answer any of the questions put to him. He talked about a €500 million investment in jobs and glossed over the fact that this is an equal sum to the amount he is slashing from the public sector wage bill.

I must admit that over the last while the Tánaiste has come in for a lot of stick about how much he has changed since he went into government. I think that is really quite unfair because I would say he has actually been very true to form. We were told a number of years ago by WikiLeaks exactly the type of operator he is, when he publicly stated he would not stand for a re-run of the Lisbon treaty referendum and then told them that was just political necessity and did something else behind the scenes. I would have to say that his skill for saying one thing and delivering the opposite has been honed into a fine art and replicated by the rest of his team in government.

The Tánaiste talks up the fact the Government has given GP cards to under-fives, but glosses over the fact that it has taken three times that amount off the medical card budget. He boasts about €14 million for a youth guarantee and says nothing about the €32 million the Government is axing from social welfare payments to young people. The Government announced yesterday a pyrite remediation scheme of €10 million as if it were a great leap forward, when it announced the same scheme this time last year - although it was then €50 million - as a first step in dealing with the tens of thousands of houses in that category. The Minister, Deputy Howlin, had the neck to tell us here on Tuesday that past budgets during this Government's term have been progressive. He told us that nobody is ideologically attached to austerity. If they are not ideologically attached to austerity, what is it, then? A coincidence? In fact, the Government has taken more money out of this economy than was even demanded by the troika.

Thank you, Deputy.

It is an ideological question. It is political treachery but it is also not even original. My question to the Tánaiste is whether he got his idea from David Cameron and the Tories, because David Cameron announced his plan for young people a couple of weeks ago. He wants to remove those under 25 from entitlement to jobseeker's and housing benefit because they should be earning or learning.

Thank you, Deputy.

That is the Tánaiste's rhetoric. My questions to the Tánaiste are as follows. His Government has stood over a revolution in social policy, overturning the benefits fought for by the trade union movement.

The Deputy is over time.

That trade union movement yesterday challenged the Tánaiste to produce the figures and the research that backs up the waffle he has been giving the Chamber this morning.

Deputy, you are over time. Will you please adhere to what the Chair says? Thank you.

It asked him to provide the research that shows that cutting young people's benefits will create jobs and not lead to poverty.

Answer that.

I am true to form.

WikiLeaks.

I am here in this House quite a long time. I make no apology for engaging with any Member of this House, as I have done over the years-----

Not with the Labour Party, though. He was separate then.

-----in robust debate, but I have never stooped to making an attack on anybody's character. Deputy Daly should not invite me to reciprocate.

The Tánaiste does it regularly.

That is as low as a snake's belly.

If you do not mind, can we hear an answer?

He is misleading the Dáil.

Deputy Daly asked me where we got the idea for our approach to youth unemployment.

The Tories.

We have developed over a period of time the idea of a youth guarantee. The level of youth unemployment in this country and in a number of other European countries is too high and we want to get it down. We will get it down by creating employment, by providing work experience opportunities and by providing the education and training that equips young people to get into employment. We reached agreement on a youth guarantee under the chairmanship of my colleague, the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Joan Burton, at the European Social Affairs Council last February. In the course of negotiating the European budget last summer, we reached agreement on the provision of €6 billion initially, and it ended up being about €8 billion in funding for that initiative. We front-loaded that initiative to 2014 and 2015 and, in this budget, we are making provision for matching funding for that youth guarantee so we can provide employment opportunities for young people.

It is €14 million out of €6 billion.

The approach we are taking in the budget is, first, to provide additional funding for measures that will increase and accelerate, we hope, the rate of job creation in the country, which will provide employment opportunities for young people. Second, it is to ensure there is sufficient funding for the education and training sector so there will be opportunities for young people to get education and training to equip them for the jobs of today and the jobs of the future, and to provide additional funding so the youth guarantee programme can proceed. Our objective is to ensure the young people of this country get the opportunity of work, which is what they need, and that they are equipped with the education and training which will provide them with the skills to take up those employment opportunities. For the life of me I cannot see why Deputy Daly is against that approach.

The only guarantee for young people is if there is a job at the end of it. As the Tánaiste has not answered the question and has demonstrated that he has done no research on this-----

I did answer the question.

I am using the Tánaiste's answer. He talks about additional funding. In his answer to Deputy McDonald, he lauded the fact the Government is, for example, recruiting extra gardaí. However, he glosses over the fact that the changes to the pension scheme are going to result in about 1,000 gardaí walking out of their jobs, so the net result will, in fact, not be any extra job creation.

The Government is taking €500 million from the public sector wage bill, the same figure that it is miraculously using to invest in job creation. One can do the sums. It is not just me who is saying this because others have conducted research on it. These are people who gave the Tánaiste a livelihood in the trade union movement when he did not work here and whose subscriptions helped to get him elected to the House. Yesterday the Irish Congress of Trade Unions stated the Government's policies, which it had researched, would result in the loss of 30,000 jobs. That is the Tánaiste's budget. His colleague and fellow party member, Mr. Michael Taft, has said the allowances and incentives introduced rely on the private market and that there is no guarantee that the targets will be met or that the activity would not have happened anyway. For the benefit of the young people who might be listening to these proceedings, will the Tánaiste say where the jobs for them are? The only conclusion they can draw is that they will be poorer and driven out of the country as a result of the Tánaiste's policies.

I can show where the jobs are. We are creating 3,000 additional jobs a month. The Deputy can look at the list of job announcements made every month by IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland to see the additional jobs being created. We have made provision in the budget to accelerate the number of the jobs that will be created. Many of the measures are targeted at the construction sector, in which there has been a very high level of unemployment. The number on the live register is declining significantly for the first time in a number of years. It is about creating jobs.

Today I am glad to see that agreement has been reached on the budget in the United States. Sensible people on both sides of the aisle in the United States House of Representatives got together and agreed a budget. Agreement on a budget had been held up for weeks by the extreme ideological voices of the Tea Party. The more I hear Deputy Clare Daly rail and shout against problems rather than provide solutions, the more I come to the conclusion that she is the Irish equivalent of the Tea Party.