Mr. John McKeon:

When we were developing JobPath, we looked at the existing capacity, particularly whether we could ramp up the Intreo service, but it was not feasible to do that. There are consequences from ramping it up in that, generally, it becomes a fixed cost which we cannot wind back when we come into a boom period.

In terms of the other constraint on us, we spoke to other providers. We had three or four fora to which we invited the Irish Local Development Network, ILDN, and others to come in to talk to us. We have separate meetings with the ILDN. Some ILDN and LES companies tendered for the contract but one of the constraints was that because of the scale of this procurement, it had to be done under European Union procurement rules. There was no option to simply expand. We have to remember that the local employment services, which I presume the Deputy is talking about, are private limited companies. We are talking about a contract where we are spending €50 million a year. We simply could not spend that type of money without going through the EU procurement process. However, we did speak to the ILDN and the local employment services. We canvassed our views on what the contract should look like. We had Enterprise Ireland support capacity building workshops for them so that they would be in a position to compete. All of that was done, and some of them did compete. That is the position on that.

On the long-term unemployed, the definition of long-term unemployed is someone who has been unemployed more than 12 months. The number of people who are long-term unemployed on the live register differs from that in the quarterly national household survey, QNHS, formerly the labour force survey. The QNHS asks people about their perception of the duration of time they have been unemployed and that might be different from the amount of time we have been paying them. It also differs in that not everybody who is on the live register would be counted on the QNHS. For example, we count people in part-time work on the live register but they are not counted on the QNHS.

At this point in time we have 92,000 or 93,000 long-term unemployed people on the live register. In addition to that, we have 30,000 to 35,000 people who are on programmes such as community employment, CE, Tús and so on. In aggregate, therefore, the number is approximately-----