Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will try my best to keep my answer to two minutes. On that overall goal of facilitating work for all who can work, there are a number of categories within that where things are happening. For people with disabilities in particular, there are a couple of Dormant Accounts Fund projects in the Department of Social Protection that are doing good work in that regard. There are also wage support schemes for people with disabilities and there are thousands of people benefiting from those.

The Deputy is getting more at community employment schemes here, however. We recognise at a local level that there are two loose cohorts of people who participate on such schemes. There are some who are more in the activation space and some who we can classify as in the social inclusion space. If I recall reading this correctly - I stand open to correction - many of the sponsors liked to retain the fluidity between those two groups. We should all be reluctant to say that someone might never work in a commercial sense as the Deputy said. We accept that some people probably never will do so but we must at least ensure that they still have the opportunity to do that. It is important that they are not prevented from doing that.

On RAPID, I am open to the Deputy's suggestion that we have a more formal discussion but we would need to frame how it would take place. It may be of interest to him that we are piloting a small number of place based leadership programmes. One is in Darndale and another in Drogheda, areas experiencing the type of deprivation and social issues to which he referred. This is about pulling together the agencies already on the ground because while much is being done on the ground, it is often done in silos and people do not talk to each other. This pilot based leadership scheme is about pulling people together, pooling resources and being more coherent. It is small and not on the scale of RAPID but as I mentioned to Senator Wall, in terms of the community enhancement programme and the use of the Pobal deprivation index, money is being targeted by local community and development committees, LCDCs, at a local level as well to community groups.

I risk disagreeing with Deputy Ó Cuív on the supplementary welfare allowance and community welfare officers. I understand from the feedback I get that community welfare officers still exercise significant discretion and flexibility. One hears cases of people not getting the support they hoped for or sought but community welfare officers are about flexibility and discretion. I am eager to see that as a reality on the ground.