Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief because I have to make a television appearance in a few minutes. I listened carefully to all of the contributions, which have been positive. However, one of the objectives is to extend employment opportunities to all who can work. Once again, and for the 15 millionth time in politics - this is not just directed at the Minister of State but it has been directed at all my colleagues over the years - we have a class of people who will never get or who are unlikely to get commercial employment, who want to work and who make a good contribution when they get opportunities on schemes such as Tús, the rural social scheme or community employment schemes. I am wondering if we can collectively plead that this basic right to work, to make a contribution and to get up in the morning with a purpose will be granted.

When the Tús scheme was set up, it was done so backwards to the way it is at the moment. The idea was that one did three years on a community employment scheme. Then if one did not get commercial employment through activation, one would move onto a Tús work scheme where one would be able to effectively continue without being trained into some job one was never likely to get. All of our community centres, outdoor facilities and so on are maintained by people on these schemes. This is work that has to be done and it is not work for the sake of work but it gives people a sense of self-worth and, properly done, it also gives them a bit of extra income. I am begging that this would be looked at because it is the main thing that would help a lot of people who are begging us to stay on schemes when they come to the end of them. It is not a problem getting people to go on a scheme but it is a problem allowing people to stay on one.

I heard the Minister of State's response to the question on RAPID. I would like to tease this issue out further. It did not matter what way the statistics were done, the same areas came up. The Minister of State may remember the famous Trutz Haase index. On one occasion I had someone from Trutz Haase in the office and I was shown an interesting experiment. He said it was amazing that if one puts in the areas of the country that buy the fewest tickets from Ticketmaster, it will be more or less coterminous with the RAPID areas. I told him he was codding, he showed me quite a few areas that I threw at him and it worked more or less perfectly. The point I am making is that regardless of how one looks at it, the same areas always come to the fore in this regard. Those areas all have major problems. That does not mean that individual poverty does not exist in other places but where one gets huge concentrations of disadvantage, that disadvantage feeds itself and creates a massive community of problems beyond the individual.

Perhaps the Minister of State would give a commitment that he will come before the committee some day - if the committee invites him and he agrees - to discuss this issue of the urban areas that suffer the most disadvantage and nothing else. I do not care how we define them because we will wind up with the same areas if we are honest and if we do not start spreading out to everybody. This was a focused scheme. Would the Minister of State consider that?

I agree with all the points made by the other contributors. In the past ten years, the nature of supplementary welfare has changed. Family circumstances can be complex. Someone in a house could have an income and that household could still be really poor because of family circumstances. If, for example, one member of a couple is earning money and not giving it over, there can be crisis. He or she might disappear for a weekend to a hostelry or somewhere.

In the old days, the community welfare officer knew the people and had discretion but now it is all done on the basis of an eight-page formula. There is no discretion to deal with real crisis poverty and with emergencies that arise as was the case in the past. One could say that maybe there was a leakage of money that should not have been leaked, and maybe there was. On the other hand, which scenario would we prefer? Would we prefer that some money got wasted and that we rescued a whole lot of people in dire situations which, on the surface, would not pass the slow means test relating to the current supplementary welfare allowance and that some money would go to waste or that we leave those people absolutely stuck? We know that the only place those people can go in those really tough situations is to the moneylender. This is a serious issue and those are my points. Can the Minister of State keep the answers to two minutes because I have to buzz off and do a television appearance over in Buswells?