Mr. Jim Lynch:

Generally speaking, that would be our approach. Sometimes it manifests itself in obvious ways when someone comes to us to fill a form, we ask him or her for some subsequent information and our staff member who is dealing with the person at the window can see the difficulty. Our front-line staff who deal with such applicants would generally be sensitive to such matters and part of the awareness training we will have done with them is to be conscious and sensitive of those matters. They would be conscious of that.

When it comes to such persons' interaction with a case officer from the point of view of activation subsequently, one of our referral mechanisms in trying to enhance their skills would be a referral to the education and training board, ETB, for adult learning or the National Adult Literacy Agency, NALA. We are conscious of the referral afterwards that we cannot refer those clients to somewhere where reading and writing might be necessary. We are conscious that we need to bring their skill level up to the stage where they can take advantage of that.

I would be the first to admit it can be difficult. There is embarrassment on the client's side and on the side of our case officer to find a suitable intervention for the person. We try to work with clients and bring them along where we can. We know the way the employment environment has gone. If a person is not literate, his or her chances are minimal.

We build up good relations. I would like especially to compliment some of the community employment supervisors who operate in this area. Some community employment supervisors and sponsors can be very conscious of this, and if we have such one-to-one contact, we can ask them to take a person on board or to consider him or her whereby literacy can be addressed as part of the community employment training. We find that works well. In the example Deputy Carey used in connection with somebody who has manual skills and many not be good at numeracy, we would see a community employment intervention as an ideal intervention to bring that person to the level where he or she could participate or achieve something out of it, and he or she will be doing something as well at the same time. I hope that answers the Deputy's question.