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

I thank the Chairperson very much. The onus is on ourselves today. When saying that, the challenge that we face in the coming two months is to put together a set of strong recommendations with doable, achievable and challenging targets. We have to get away from aspirational language that aspires to everything but does not deliver anything.

I am delighted that Galway Traveller Movement, GTM, are here today and are obviously based in Galway. I remember when First Class Insulation was set up because I was a Minister at the time. From its very inception, it was a very challenging but brilliant idea and one that has worked extraordinarily well. I say that it was a brilliant idea because it was really putting it up to people that if a person could do the job, it did not matter who the person was. The idea that the firm was going into people’s houses to do this work and that it achieved such a high level of satisfaction was something that many people would have said was not possible at the beginning. I hear complaints in my constituency office about anything and everything and from people all over the place but only twice ever in all of the years that it has been operating have I had to ring First Class Insulation about a query that was raised with me, and it was solved within 24 hours. I wish I could say that about the rest of the people that I contact. There is immense satisfaction from customers. The company competes and it delivers. One of the disappointments I have is that in the ensuing years there have not been many more of these social enterprise models set up where people are given a chance to operate in the marketplace to prove their skills.

That is one recommendation that we should be able to make.

The Community Services Programme, which is the programme involved, comes under the Department of Rural and Community Development and we will be making budget recommendations as well. With my other hat on - as a member of the Committee on Social Protection, Community and Rural Development and the Islands - I will be recommending that we increase the number of schemes. If someone were to ask me about the hierarchy of schemes, CE is fine but if CE is just a person going in there because he or she has no way of getting a job, and at the end of the three years that person will just see what happens then it actually defeats the purpose for a large measure of people because the future is not there. This is true not only among the Travelling community but among people who often go on CE schemes. The architecture is all wrong. I have said time and again that as far as I am concerned, when a person goes on a CE scheme, he or she should have whatever time he or she has on it, say two or three years, to get trained and into employment. I am saying this right across the board, I am not saying this specifically about Travellers but include them. At the end of that period, if a person has not got commercial employment, he or she should be offered employment on another scheme. In that case, the idea was that it would be the TÚS scheme and that it would be open-ended whereby people would provide vital services to society in the even of a person not getting commercial employment in the private economy, which we know is a challenge not only for Travellers. It is a huge challenge for Travellers with the prejudice against them but there are also other people in society who are unlikely to get commercial employment for various reasons. On the other hand, if the training succeeds the person jumps into commercial employment and moves on. I regard the social economy as above that in what we will call the hierarchy of progression because it is long term, it is semi-commercial, a person can stay on it forever and it is a full-time job with paid wages and that is why we need more in that intermediate area.

I want to make my views known on internships. Over the years I have had plenty of interns come into my office, students mainly. I have had people from the junior certificate in for three or four days and I have had interns from university. Why do I think internships are valuable? They give somebody experience in the workplace. That is of huge benefit because having employed many people in my life, if they worked out, I made sure that either I got them a job or gave them a job. There were many people I had as interns but even prior to that many to whom I gave short-term employment. Now, 30 or 40 years later, they are working because, as work became available, they became full-time and then a lot of them went off and started their own businesses. Getting that toe in the door in the first job is always a particular challenge for any of us but it is ten times harder for somebody from the Traveller community.

The second thing is that if a person has had an employer, particularly if it is a long-term internship of say, six to eight months, then that employer can give a reference. Where one can give a strong reference to a person it often counts an awful lot. Therefore internships work for everybody; they work for young students and they work for a lot of people. Certainly, I have had people work for me about whom I might have received a phone call from a prospective employer asking if they worked for me and I might have said I would take them back in the morning if I had a job to offer and it broke my heart when they went because they were really going somewhere. Therefore, internships are not the end, they should be the beginning of a stepped process. Just as they are huge opportunities for settled people, they offer Travellers equal opportunities and I have seen their worth at first hand.

We must crack the problem of State employment. We must ensure Travellers can access it and that the State takes a proactive role in this rather than a reactive one. I am aware some work is going on but we need to bring that to a conclusion and we need to open the doors because the more people get access then the next generation will have even more access. There is no point in talking about role models when nobody got the chance in the first place. What I would therefore suggest to anybody who does not know about First Class Insulation and the companies in Galway is that they go there and meet GTM, who will explain it. It has been an absolute model. As somebody on the ground, who knows many thousands of people who have availed of their services, I wish everything worked as well as First Class Insulation and its successor.

Finally, we have pushed Travellers out of self-employment. A lot of new regulation came in affecting the businesses which they were in. Travellers are exceptionally good business people but like us all their skills are in different directions and in special situations. Having started a very small business, I learned the hard way when one is in a very small business one must be the human resources, HR, department, the finance department, know all about the taxes, do the actual practical job of providing whatever service one is offering, to do all the manufacturing and so on. When one has a big company one can hire HR, have a specialist doing all the research, another doing all the accounts and so on. Remember, therefore, the hardest business job in the whole world is the small business job because one must be multiskilled and multitask. We must put many more supports around small self-employed businesses owned by Travellers, in terms of premises and backup with skills which they might not have - and none of us has all the skills. From setting up a co-operative, I know nobody who has all the skills in business but the difference is that the big people can buy the skills they are short of whereas the small person is trying to juggle everything at the one time. We must put a lot more resources and supports into helping people with whatever they perceive to be the part of the business which may be causing them the most trouble because I have no doubt there are a huge number of Travellers for whom their particular desire would be self-employment rather than employment and we have locked them out of that, even if traditionally it was where most of them operated.