Commenting on the draft European Commission 7th Review of Ireland's Bailout Agreement, the organisation said that the Commission is ignoring the key issue that jobs are not being created on the scale required.
A spokesperson for the independent non-governmental organisation added that Ireland has a track record of people working if jobs are available.
Michelle Murphy, Research and Policy Analyst with SJI, which is committed to working to build a just society, explained that five years ago there were only 28,000 people unemployed for more than a year.
Today it is more than 200,000.
“The vast majority of the long-term unemployed would take up a job if it existed yet the European Commission and the Government are focused only on activation measures and penalising people for not taking up jobs, which in reality, don't exist,” Ms Murphy said.
“For unemployment to remain above 13% in 2015, as forecast by the European Commission, is completely unacceptable.”
The SJI spokeswoman said the strategy being pursued by the European Commission and Government is not working and immediate additional action is required to address long-term unemployment.
SJI supports the provision of activation programmes but claims that without large numbers of additional jobs the activation will not solve the current crisis.
The group would like to see the Government create a part-time job opportunities programme aimed at taking up to 100,000 long-term unemployed people off the live register over a three-year period.
This approach was successfully piloted in six different parts of the country during Ireland's last period of high unemployment (1994-98).
"This programme was mainstreamed by the Rainbow Coalition Government in 1997 and worked very well then. It has the potential to dramatically reduce the numbers who are long-term unemployed today,” Michelle Murphy commented.
The part-time job opportunities programme presented to Government by SJI proposes the creation of 100,000 part-time jobs for unemployed people who would be paid at the going hourly rate.
Participants would work the number of hours required to earn the equivalent of their social welfare payment and a small top-up. Access would be on a voluntary basis only.
Jobs would be created in the public sector and the community and voluntary sector, while participants would be remunerated principally through the reallocation of social welfare payments.
Working on these jobs, participants would be allowed to take up other paid employment in their spare time without incurring loss of benefits and would be liable to tax in the normal way if their income was sufficient to bring them into the tax net.
“Implementation of this programme would produce a triple-win situation: it would benefit those who were long-term unemployed and their families; it would benefit local communities and local services; and it would benefit economic development”, according to Michelle Murphy.
“It would also ensure that participants maintained their skills and were job-ready when the economy recovered. Developing programmes such as these would help unemployed people, which is in marked contrast to the scapegoating being engaged in by the troika.”