Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I accept that. The difficulty many people in the sector and many people committed to the principle of partnership see is that as we continue to treat each of these policy tools and their administration as services, it restricts the ability of local communities to come together in partnership to respond to local needs. Mr. McKeon said this is a contract that goes back 25 years. Communities like mine in Ballymun and Finglas and many others had pockets of disadvantage and still have, and many of the partnerships were established to bring agencies together to move away from a national focus to allow a local response. The difficulty with the SICAP being tendered as a contract, the local employment services being tendered as a single contract and the Tús scheme and community employment scheme being more under the control of the Department is that they make sense if we were replying to the Comptroller and Auditor General and analysing this as an accounting exercise but they remove the local focus. For example, if there was a significant job loss in Dublin Port, the local employment service that covers the north inner city would be equipped to handle that and to put in place local solutions. Equally, the same would apply if there was a significant drop in employment, as happened in Ballymun in 2010 and 2011 where we did not have many of the new unemployed that many of the other services had but rather had people who had been successfully placed in employment who then returned to the services and those people required a different response from, for example, people in Glasnevin and Drumcondra who might have been experiencing unemployment for the first time. If we move from a local to regional approach we remove the local focus and the ability of local communities to respond. This is about bringing all the stakeholders in an area together. Many people are asking whether the Department is committed to the principle of partnership in the way it would have championed it in the mid-1990s.