Anthony Lawlor (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for coming to the meeting. He is always welcome here. I congratulate him on the success of the EU Presidency.

The Minister has mentioned that the Action Plan for Jobs relates to a number of Departments. Which of them is the lead Department in this regard?

The Leader programme, a significant source of funding for start-up companies and businesses in rural areas, is run by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine comes into it also.

The aim of the JobsPlus scheme which was launched yesterday and the Pathways to Work scheme is to get young people back to work. As Deputy Dara Calleary said, the Department of Social Protection is responsible for these schemes. I want to find out what is the lead authority. What Department looks after the questions asked about this matter?

I appreciate that the Minister is not directly responsible for the JobsPlus scheme. As it focuses on people who have been unemployed for longer periods of time, it could be said to discriminate against people who receive short-term contracts of two or three months before going back to square one and trying to find employment once more. When one examines the figures, one finds that even when there was full employment, almost 60,000 people were deemed to be long-term unemployed. Such persons are being given more opportunities than those who take up short-term work and then have to go to the back of the queue. It seems unfair that employers who are trying to maximise the amount of money they receive from the Department are being asked to take on those who have been out of the workforce for a longer period of time, rather than those who have managed to find some short-term work. Perhaps something might be done in that regard.

As I mentioned to the Minister previously, many small and medium-sized enterprises are caught in a gap - they are too big to receive microfinance and too small to avail of some of the larger financial packages available. Most of them encounter short-term cash flow problems that last a couple of months. I ask that something be done to assist them.

I welcome today's announcement that the growth figure for the UK economy, one of our biggest trading partners, has been revised upwards to 0.9%. I have also noticed figures which suggest the level of unemployment among women has remained fairly static in the past year, whereas the level among men has dropped. Some will say they are all leaving the country, but that is not true. There has been a dramatic drop in the level of male unemployment, but the level of female unemployment seems to be remaining static. Can we do something to encourage more females who are unemployed back into the workforce? Perhaps we might take the same approach to the entrepreneurial fund that we took in the case of youth employment when we provided for a young person's bonus. We might look at what we can do to support females who want to come forward.