Mr. Terry Corcoran:

I will deal with remaining issues. More broadly on youth employment policies, as opposed to JobBridge on its own, the primary Government strategy to tackle youth unemployment is through policies to create the environment for a strong economic recovery by promoting competitiveness and productivity, primarily through the Action Plan for Jobs. However, the Government recognises that as the recovery takes hold, there is a need for additional measures to ensure that as many as possible of the jobs created are taken up by unemployed job seekers and, in accordance with the EU Council recommendation for a Youth Guarantee, by young job seekers in particular. This is the rationale behind the Government’s Pathways to Work strategy and the treatment of young people within that strategy.

The Youth Guarantee sets a medium-term objective of ensuring that young people receive an offer of employment, education or training within four months of becoming unemployed. With services such as Intreo, Youthreach, VTOS, PLC programmes and JobBridge, Ireland already had many of the component parts of a Youth Guarantee as suggested by the European Commission. The main plank of the guarantee in Ireland is to prioritise access to these programmes for young people who become unemployed, with the objective of ensuring that they have an opportunity for employment, further education or work experience within the recommended period of four months of becoming unemployed, as per the EU Council recommendation.

A comprehensive account of the approach to the roll-out of the Youth Guarantee is set out in the Youth Guarantee Implementation Plan published in January 2014. As outlined in the plan, the first intervention is to provide case officer support to help newly unemployed young people find and secure sustainable jobs. Accordingly, operating processes have been refined in each of our regions to prioritise the early engagement of young people through Intreo to ensure that all young people receive expert advice and have access to progression options. That advice may be delivered by the Local Employment Service, LES, where one exists, as is the case in Ballymun, for example. The LES is not universally available across the country but there is substantial coverage. In areas where there is no LES, advice will be delivered by the Department's own staff. In addition, as part of our commitment to engage with 100,000 long-term unemployed people through the Intreo and JobPath processes during 2015, we are prioritising engagement with the approximately 13,000 young people who are already long-term unemployed. In implementing these processes, the Department is applying learning from the Ballymun Youth Guarantee Pilot Project and making extensive use of the services of the LES and Job Clubs, as was the case in Ballymun. The description the members heard of the use of inter-agency approaches to developing additional mentoring and programme places is also being applied in a number of other areas in the country, involving youth service organisations, in particular, in the delivery of a programme which I will refer to later. It is a development from JobBridge.

For those who do not find employment through the process just described, additional offers are provided for. Most such offers - over 70% - are in existing further education or training programmes. Others are in existing community based employment programmes such as CE, Gateway and Tús. In some cases under the guarantee, access to these programmes has been liberalised for young people. In the past, such access was much more concentrated on older, long-term unemployed people.

In addition we have recently introduced two new programmes specifically for young people. The first of these is JobsPlus youth, an employment subsidy for unemployed people under 25 years of age which is payable after four months of unemployment. The subsidy can be up to €416 per month for two years for an employer who takes on a qualified young person. The duration for access to that programme for older unemployed people is one year. The second programme is the developmental internships programme First Steps which aims to offer young people who are particularly distant from the labour market a work experience opportunity with sponsor employers. The witnesses from Ballymun put such people in the "Group One" category.

Some of the initiatives that were planned under the Youth Guarantee required primary legislation to allow positive discrimination on age grounds in the provision of employment services and supports. That legislation was passed late last year.