The General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, David Begg, has told Labour delegates it was imperative there was significant new investment in the economy in order to boost domestic demand and create jobs.
Delivering a special address to the Labour Party's annual conference in Galway, Mr Begg said Congress was working with Government on an initiative that could see private Irish pension funds invest in major infrastructure projects.
"We are trying to work together with Labour Ministers on this idea and it is imperative that we succeed. We have to use our ingenuity to get investment into the domestic economy.
"Only measures to boost demand have any chance of easing the employment situation. That is why practical initiatives for investment in infrastructure are so crucial," Mr Begg said.
He told delegates that Irish workers were entitled to see some of their pension funds put to productive use here at home.
"That money is invested all over the world, why not Ireland? It will cut very little ice with workers to tell them their pension fund earned a fraction of a percent more by investing it in Brazil rather than in Ireland, if they have no jobs to retire from," he said.
While praising the Labour Party on its achievements in Government, Mr Begg said he would be "failing" in his duty if he did speak to delegates of the "soul destroying, morale sapping and destructive pall of unemployment."
Mr Begg was highly critical of the role played by key EU institutions in the crisis and described the European Central Bank as "complicit" in making the taxpayer responsible for private bank debts.
"The fact that the ECB was complicit in that decision and will not now take its boot off our necks to allow us to ameliorate that debt, is reprehensible.
"I do not expect much help from Europe. Europe is currently under the control of neoliberal ideologues who are quite willing to press their austerity dogma to destruction - our destruction. We are too small to matter.
"We are no more than an economic laboratory in which they can try out ever more extreme versions of policies that have already failed.
"Any notion of European solidarity, for me anyway, dissolved on the streets of Athens.
Mr Begg said the crucial task at an EU level was to re-establish "social democracy as the guiding philosophy of European integration."
