Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is. We can have a conversation or debate without always having to interrupt people. It is just basic manners. Opinion is not fact. If somebody works a 40-hour week on the minimum wage in Ireland, it is almost €400 per week and the CE programme pays less than €200. Somebody on the minimum wage in Ireland working 30 hours per week is better off than somebody on CE so why would we want to lock somebody on a scheme rather than allow him or her get a minimum wage job? That job is better paid than any scheme we have to offer.

The Deputy also mentioned privatisation.

Seetec is a for-profit company. Turas Nua is generally not-for-profit but many community employment, CE, sponsors and Tús sponsors are also private entities, and some of them are companies too. It is not unprecedented, therefore, to have services outsourced to private providers.

Something I do intend to do, and I would hope people accept that this is the way forward because I acknowledge that some CE schemes and many CE supervisors are having trouble filling their positions, is to relax the rules in January to widen the pool of people eligible for CE. Widening the pool will mean that the people schemes have to choose from will be a harder to reach group of people who need some more support and work. Some CE schemes and CE supervisors will be happy with that because they are going back to their original effort, namely, social inclusion as well as employment activation, which is helping people who really need help and have difficulty holding down a job. Others would prefer to be able to pick from a wider bunch of easier to work with people, but that is not where we should be, and now that we are back in a situation where we are approaching low unemployment, CE schemes should be more for people who cannot get minimum wage jobs or any job. That is why I intend to relax those rules in the new year to widen the pool of people who can access CE and Tús but not to prevent them from getting gainful employment, even if it is a minimum wage job.

On the back to work family dividend, it is a new scheme. It is difficult to estimate what the cost of it will be but we can give the Deputy more information on that if he wishes.

On the Christmas bonus, Christmas bonuses were only ever paid to long-term payment recipients. It was always the case that they have to be on long-term payment to avail of the Christmas bonus. It was never paid to people on illness benefit. Somebody should not be on illness benefit since 2005. I do not want to comment on an individual case but if the Deputy gives us the details, we will look into it. It is supposed to be a short-term payment so somebody who is on it for that length of time should be on disability or invalidity pension, in which case they would receive the bonus.

On the opticians and the dentists, I had a very good meeting with the dentists last week and we are now in the position where we are trying to determine how it will work, but I am more confident than I might have been a week or two ago that we will be able to meet the March and October deadlines. That meeting went well. They have their requests, but that engagement will happen now at official level. I will be speaking at one of their conferences in the new year and I would hope we will have that done within the timeframe for which we budgeted.

On Gateway, there is a significant underspend on Gateway. That is down to less interest from local authorities. The scheme is still in place. Many local authorities are not as interested in it as they were in the past. Sometimes that is because they are taking on people. My local authority, Fingal, hired some people who were in Gateway, which was welcome. In some cases, however, unions have withdrawn co-operation with Gateway, and for that reason local authorities are less interested. The programme remains in place but we are considering winding it down. Like JobBridge, it was a scheme for its time and there is less need for it now than would have been the case in the past. We are considering the possibility of having a local authority arm and bringing it in under Tús rather than having a separate scheme, but a definite decision on that has not yet been made.

On the penalties, I reiterate that the only body that can impose penalty rates on anyone is the Department of Social Protection. JobPath, Seetec, Turas Nua, local employment services and any of the rest of them cannot impose penalty rates. That can only be done by the Department deciding officer. Someone is less likely to have a penalty rate imposed on them if they are on JobPath than on Intreo, which is interesting. People working with our case officers in Intreo are more likely to have a penalty rate imposed on them than those who are referred to JobPath, which is a point worth making.

So far in 2016, we reckon approximately 10,000 people will have had a penalty rate imposed on them at some point so we are talking about only 2% or 3% of people. To be frank, in the real world there are 2% or 3% of people who do not engage and what do we do about that? Should we tell them it is fine not to engage, that they do not have to turn up for interviews or training or do anything, that we do not care and that they should just keep taking the money? There are 1% or 2% of people who will have penalty rates imposed on them for not participating and engaging, and we will continue to do that.