Brendan Ryan (Dublin North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Another question may have to be directed at the officials. I have been sitting here trying to rationalise the calculation on value for payment. For example, we can take community employment schemes. Numbers have gone down so we might expect, with fixed and variable costs, that value for payment would increase, which it has. The throughput has increased in the back to education allowance. Intuitively, with fixed and variable costs one might expect the value for payment to go down but it has gone up as well.