John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Conlon. Before I go to the committee members I will briefly raise two matters. First, Ms Murphy in her conclusion talked about the current position regarding the directive. I ask her to give a very brief overview to the committee of this process and the timelines surrounding the directive.

I wish to address Mr. Conlon on the second matter and then I will open the discussion up to the committee. I do not expect him to be able to answer this, but there is information he might provide to the committee that would be useful. This is an ongoing piece of work the committee is doing and not just a single day's hearing. I was surprised by two comments he made in his written submission. It states, "I want to emphasise that JobPath has not replaced any existing service provision, either that provided directly by staff within the Department or that provided under other external activation services." It goes on to state, "I also want to emphasise that JobPath does not have any negative impact on the existing Local Employment Service (LES) and Job Clubs." I do not know whether that is true. It is just a statement. What I would like from the Department are the monthly referrals for a number of years from the Department to JobPath, the LES, community employment, CE, and so forth. It is very easy to say there are fewer referrals now because, obviously, the live register is smaller. I ask for this information in order that we can see month by month the referrals to the different groups when the live register was at a certain level. Members of the committee would be of the view that referrals to the likes of the LES are not what they were previously. I do not want to get into the numbers now, but information on the referrals to the committee on a month-by-month basis, in tabular form, would be quite useful.