Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Even though, as we have discussed, the pressures on spending and increases in demand are very heavy, we have prioritised additional spending to help people to get back to work. The spend on all employment supports has increased by €100 million, or by 10.7%. The Deputy will recall that in the budget we expanded the number of placements in areas such as the community employment, Tús and JobBridge programme and the new local authority social employment scheme by 10,000. We are putting intense resources into the activation model, the new Intreo. We have opened offices in various parts of the country and hope to open more. We will come to all of this in the context of each programme heading.