Mr. Paul Carroll:

Even to make concrete some of what Mr. McKeon is saying, today there is a course starting in Croke Park. It is a course in social entrepreneurship that is being provided by the UCD Innovation Academy as part of the Ballymun youth guarantee. It is a part-time programme over 18 weeks. It is about creative thinking and positive thinking. The hope would be that many of the participants there would progress to self-employment or, if not, they are the kinds of persons that we want in business who are problem solvers and creative thinkers. We will be providing support after the event.

For those who have a specific idea about what they would like to do in terms of self-employment, we will be supporting them through the funding provided by Microfinance Ireland or the credit union loan guarantee and the soft supports that either the LEO or the partnership would be providing. There is, in fact, a lot of synergy going on. There is a lot of creative thinking going on. We are absolutely committed to trying to harness the entrepreneurial spirit and innovation of those within the committee. In fact, we will be thinking beyond the mere 18-week course provided by UCD Innovation Academy asking, for example, if there are opportunities in terms of developing innovative CE schemes where the young people in the community can identify gaps in provision within the community and go on themselves to start up companies, either in the public or private sector. It is an issue of which we are well aware and which we are doing our best to support.

There was a question about the pilot Ballymun youth guarantee scheme and why it was confined to the live register. There is an agreement with the European Union, which is providing the vast bulk of the funding for it. We have a contract with the Union to deliver and we are not at liberty to broaden the scope of it, although, as my colleague, Mr. McKeon, stated, there is a broad range of other supports available to employers to assist those who have disabilities or who are not fully able to go back to work.

In terms of how real it is on the ground, we only became operational in Ballymun at the end of January. Our commitment to the young people of Ballymun is that we will give each of them who is signing on to the live register a guarantee - a quality offer of education, training, development, work experience or work, within a period of four months after a one-to-one engagement.

So far, the findings are good. We have seen 360 people so far of which, already, 75% have been given a quality offer. Some 60% of those are into education and 40% into employment.