Mr. Adrian Kane:

I will answer on the industrial relations side of the questions posed by Senator Wall. We met last year in regard to the Local Employment Service, LES, and jobs clubs but we have had very poor engagement with the Department since and we have not established a mechanism yet to deal with the impending redundancies in the sector. We had a meeting with the Department yesterday which was far from satisfactory. We are going nowhere in regard to resolving that, although we are looking at hundreds of redundancies. The Department is refusing to step up to the mark in terms of trying to fund what is going to come out of that.

To come back to this group, we met with the Department earlier in the year in regard to the RSS and Tús. Again, we have not made much progress in terms of a very reasonable request for an evaluation process, which is typical where a grade of employee has evolved, the work has changed and so on. All we are looking for is an independent mechanism to do that. Either the claim falls or it has merit, but that objective analysis is something we are up for. We believe 15% is a huge differential on pay between community employment, CE, supervisors and the people we are representing here. It is not tenable and it needs to be addressed urgently.