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

Since we are obsessed with figures, I think Mr. Egan said 70,000 secured short-term employment and 20,000 secured long-term employment over 12 months, and that there were 300,000 people. I look at these services as somebody who employed people and came to the conclusion that, for a fair number of people, it does not matter what is thrown at them in the form of job losses or whatever because they will find new employment fairly fast. Has any analysis been done on how many of the 20,000 people who secured long-term employment and the 70,000 people who secured short-term employment would have secured employment if JobPath not existed? That is the true value of JobPath. It is not the number who managed to get a job because from my experience of the world, it is fair to surmise that different people have different abilities for getting employment . We do not seem to get a breakdown of the number who would have secured a job in any event. I say this because the real test is whether jobs are being secured for people who would not have got employment. That obviously means that the further away from the employment market a person is, the less skills and employability, to use a term that is very hard to define, that he or she has, the harder he or she will find it to get a job. There are some people with very high qualifications who are not very employable. We have all met some of them in our lives. Since we so are obsessed with figures these days, does the Department have any analysis on this?