Dr. Peter Rigney:

For the information of the committee, there are two key documents that its members should read. One is on the website of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and was produced by the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service.

It is dated January and it is an evaluation of JobPath. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform does numbers, to the exclusion of almost all else, and states the costs per 1,000 unemployed people is €9.1 million per annum. It has crunched the numbers on JobPath. The committee should have a look at the analysis. I am not saying it is good or bad.

Second, it is always worth reading anything that comes out of the skills and labour market research unit of SOLAS. It does a fine job and should be recognised.

The National Skills Bulletin 2016 is statistics heavy, as was that for 2015. There is a chapter on labour market transitions and people going from employment to unemployment, and from unemployment to employment. There is a body of evidence developing like a storm cloud that shows there is a growing or disturbingly large cohort of people at the bottom end of the labour market who are going into and out of unemployment. That undermines the narrative we all favour, which is that going into a job should be a ladder, not a treadmill. That requires legislators to think about what they have to do legislatively.

I do not want to labour the point on JobBridge. We live in a parliamentary democracy and, irrespective of whether the issue is cash for ash or JobBridge, the Opposition has a duty to hold the Government to account. Therefore, schemes should run themselves and should raise very little noise in the administrative system. Very few parliamentary questions have been seen on JobBridge. The problem with it is that there were many good, decent employers who did the right thing but got no publicity. In order to police the level of abuse that existed, which I admit was very small, one would have needed an army of inspectors. The State does not have the resources to fund that.

There is the question of opportunity cost to be considered. I receive constant complaints from people who were given contracts of self-employment which under any legal definition are false, and they are trying to get the scope section of the Department of Social Protection to adjudicate on their cases. They are waiting for months and months because of staff shortages. For every civil servant working on administering a JobBridge scheme and trying to ensure the regulations are obeyed, there is a person in need with a bogus contract of self-employment, or perhaps not, waiting for a judgment. Therefore there are opportunity costs.