Mr. John McKeon:

I will come back to that issue. The other company is owned by an employee trust. It is not commercial in that sense. The employees, including its employees in Ireland, are the owners of the company. It is 100% owned by the employees. That needs to be borne in mind as well.

In terms of the service the two companies are meant to provide, local employment services should be sitting down with people as well, putting job vacancies in front of them and asking them about pursuing those opportunities. That is what an employment adviser does and that is what a case officer in my Department is meant to do. It is what an adviser in a JobPath company does. They are meant to put jobs in front of people, help them to apply for those jobs, put training courses in front of them and help them to progress in those training courses. It is the same service. The difference is whether it is payment by results or payment per cost inputs. One is a payment by results model; the other is a payment for cost inputs model. There is a place in every European country at which I have looked for contracted-out employment services. It is about the core element, which is the local employment services, of which our staff form the core, to deal with the steady-state level of unemployment. There is then a contracted flexible resource model to burst beyond that. That is what JobPath is about. In most places, they are payment by result models.. We are not doing anything different from what has been done in Australia, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Some people's attitude to JobPath may be informed by very bad press coverage of the system in the UK for understandable reasons. That experience has not been replicated in Ireland at all.