Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Let us use Deputy O'Dea as an example. Say we reviewed Deputy O'Dea last week and he was moved from an 85% pension to 100%. The following week's payment will not only reflect the uplift but will also include the backdated payment to 30 March last year.

I hope it will put a smile on the Deputy's face to say that it is a rare occasion when we are both on the same page when I say to a much larger audience - and I am sure that if the Minister for Finance was listening to me, he would have a heart attack - I do not treat children differently. I do not think that we should segregate children because they go to a DEIS school or a different school. We do not do that under our current provisions, for instance the cold school meals programme, the breakfast clubs or after-school clubs. There are many schools which do not have DEIS status which are involved in our programmes which is why the pilot scheme - which is only small, with 36 schools and some 7,200 kids - will not be confined to DEIS schools. My aim, which may be unusual coming from our Department, is to get a better educational outturn. Children who eat good nutritional food get better advantages from the educational offering they receive from the State. We should sample it in small schools, in rural schools, in huge urban schools and in Gaelscoileanna and hopefully that is what the pilot will do, so that a wide variety of schools by type and size are examined to reflect whether it works much better in a school which, for example, has a catering company up the road, or in a small school on the Aran Islands. That pilot will go live in a couple of months and we will get those figures relatively quickly. I do not intend to wait for years to ensure that the pilot is working, we will know relatively quickly what our aim and ambition will bear out.

The exceptional needs payments were reduced in the budget this year insofar as all the types of payments that would normally be associated with an exceptional needs claim are also reducing. I know I will be here later on in the year looking for a supplementary budget to give me more money, although I hope that we do not have to do that, but if that is the case, then that is the case. It is all demand led.

On youth unemployment, this is not an excuse but we need to do something specific over and above training and education for our young people. Some of the young people who are long-term unemployed have other challenges over and above not having the correct skillset. The Youth Employment Support Scheme, YESS, programme is something that will be genuinely beneficial. We only have a small number of people on it at the moment, but I hope to increase that number significantly at the end of the pilot project, which is six months. I say that because when I look at the norms across Europe, our unemployment and long-term unemployment figures are coming down at a much faster rate than the same figures in other countries, but youth unemployment across Europe is stubbornly static. Other European countries do not have the same economic difficulties which we experienced in recent years, yet they still have the same stubbornly high youth unemployment figures. To me, it does not correlate. Younger people today have different challenges in life than we might have had growing up and we need to genuinely address these to put in support mechanisms around them which I hope YESS programme will do, however I cannot say until the pilot is complete. However, the Deputy and I will differ that bringing the payment back to the same figure as for those aged of 25 years will not fix the problem. The problem will be fixed by finding sustainable jobs for these young people.