Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Vice Chairman for allowing me to come to the committee meeting and ask some questions, because I am not a member of the committee. What is the global figure for all participants in all the different activation schemes? There is some debate about the relationship between the number on schemes and the apparent fall in unemployment.

Does the Department in any way track the relationship between emigration and the fall in the unemployment figures? I presume that people who leave the country do not appear anywhere else on the system. Does the Department track that to show how falls in the unemployment figures relate to emigration or actual engagement with labour activation or employment?

I have a few very vociferous constituents who feel there is a problem with the JobsPlus scheme. The argument goes that when people who are trying to get back into work contact employers to go on the JobsPlus scheme, the employers say they must be joking, and why would they take them on when they could use JobBridge. I hear that quite often. How does the Department respond? I hear the witnesses say the figure is 4,000, which is not bad, but I get quite a few reports of people who would like to go on JobsPlus but find that a lot of employers do not entertain that because it is a better deal for them to pay people nothing and effectively get free labour through the JobBridge scheme.

While I take the point about positive discrimination towards the long-term unemployed on JobsPlus, there is another side to that equation. A similar argument is as follows: why would an employer take somebody on for €7,500 in the first year of unemployment instead of taking the €10,000 that is provided if the person is unemployed for more than two years? People come to me who have tried to get on the JobsPlus scheme but because they have been unemployed for less than two years the employers ask why they would take them on when they can get €10,000 for people who have been unemployed for more than two years. It is an understandable grievance on the part of somebody who is more recently unemployed who cannot get back to work because of the way the incentive works.

One-parent benefit has featured a little, but not as much recently-----