Mr. Joe Saunders:

I will make two concluding points. I will put some flesh on the bones on the matter of community benefits which the Chair raised. A Tús quota of approximately 8,000 and a rural social scheme, RSS, quota of around 3,000 represents several thousand community groups that have real people allocated to provide services to them. The people are allocated to the community sector not to the private sector. Any tinkering with or adjustment of the quotas has implications beyond the narrow activation needs of the individuals accessing the community services. Particularly from a rural perspective, and 35 of our members are rural companies, and the challenges they face in sustaining viable communities, these schemes play a very central role which must be taken into account.

Senator Higgins asked about the design phase of programmes prior to the delivery phase. It is worth bearing in mind that local development companies came out of an experimentation background. Several of our programmes are embedded and are part of life. However, what we did especially well was to respond to a call that acknowledged that nobody had all the answers to a particular problem but we need to try to pilot. Maybe we have been somewhat afraid to pilot in recent years. Now that we are at the cusp of what one might call full employment, there are difficult cohorts, new phases or a certain intractability in some areas, as has been acknowledged here, and nobody has the answers. We are open for that experimentation phase. Given that we are close to those communities and those sectors in communities, we are well placed for piloting and that element of the work outside of delivery, also needs to be taken on board.