Ms Brid O'Brien:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to meet with it. In terms of the youth guarantee, the pilot in Ballymun has been rolled out and one of the striking features of it and one of the strong lessons coming from it is the importance of inter-agency work and collaboration and the need to work with the young people concerned, in particularly the very disadvantaged young people involved, to help them find a path back to education and training or work. One of the challenges in rolling the programme out further will be ensuring the resources are put in place to ensure that the inter-agency collaboration is rolled out with the youth guarantee. It will be a big challenge to ensure that happens. Otherwise, the guarantee will not deliver what it is hoped it will. At its heart, the guarantee needs to try to create decently paid employment for young people. As some of the young people involved are very distanced from the labour market and could be coming from family or community situations where there is inter-generational unemployment, it will be key to engage meaningfully with employers and to have strong equality and social inclusion principles at the heart of guarantee and to put those into practice.

There are a few initiatives in today's Pathways to Work document dealing with developmental internships that could play an important role. It is really important that these are rolled out constructively. It is about engaging with young people, working with them, helping them to see that what is on offer will assist them and for all of the players involved to engage meaningfully and to ensure that from the outset solid supports, good information, good advice and good quality training are available. Access to employment and trying to use some of the alternative accesses to employment is another issue.

In terms of education, I fully agree with the Deputy on the importance of early intervention and that it is a good investment, particularly because every young person will attend primary school. For those who were failed by the formal education system first time round, the roll out of the further education strategy will be critical as will putting the resources in place to help those who are already distant - who perhaps left school early - to address their skills gaps. They will then have some chance of being able to get access to jobs - perhaps better jobs that are coming down the line - and of securing a better future for themselves and their families. It is very important that we do that.

On the emigration front, there is a very striking recent statistic from the CSO. Of those who emigrated, more than twice as many people who emigrated did so from a job than emigrated because they were unemployed. We do have a quality of work issue in this country. There was a report over the weekend that, after the United States, Ireland had the highest percentage of low paid jobs. We have a quality of job problem and for a lot of young people ---