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

I will be brief. I said initially there is a big difference between the number of people on the live register and the number of people who are unemployed. There are people coming on to and leaving the live register all the time. That is well recognised in the Department. Anybody who checks the figures will note the difference. Some 40,000 people have not been in employment for a long time and if they were employed, it was for a very short time. We need to reach out to those people in a comprehensive way. It will take more time to reach out to them than it will take to reach out to people who would probably get employment even if there was no intervention. The issue is that the local employment service and jobs clubs focus on the hardest to reach and those who are most remote from the labour market to encourage them to enter those services. JobPath has had success after success. Obviously, it focused on the people most likely to get jobs and, in many cases, those people would probably have jobs in any event.

I have two specific questions. How much is the JobPath model dictated by our EU requirements and obligations. Can Mr. Egan give us details of those EU obligations? If they are absolute obligations under EU rules, there is damn all we can do about it. Mr. Egan said the tendering process is constrained by EU law. He might forward us a copy of the law - I am not asking for the legal opinion of the EU laws he quoted - to enable us to separate what is Irish law and what is EU law. Each of us is a Member of the Oireachtas. If some of the matters are related to issues that arise purely in Irish law rather than EU law, we could suggest to our colleagues that the Oireachtas introduce legislation to change the law in order that tendering could take into account and favour non-profit bodies rather than entities working purely on the basis of the profit motive. That is one of the big issues that arises. Multinational companies motivated purely by profit, which have substantial resources to cover tendering, are entering this market and competing with non-profit bodies that operate on the ground, are based locally and might be able to deliver better services. One of the challenges we face is the obsession in the modern world with measuring everything. Some of the best things in life are very hard to measure.