Mr. Conor Mahon:

To build on what has been said, doing such training courses is cost-prohibitive for schemes. A scheme with a budget of €250 a year will not get even a single module of something like that completed. This goes back to the training hubs I suggested whereby, geographically, ten schemes would be brought together. I might have only one participant who wants to pursue that avenue. I will not have that kind of course available to me in the vast majority of places. Such courses will be in urban areas. I can probably pick ten locations in the country where such a course is available to people, and it will not be possible, given the financial resources of CE participants, for them to travel long distances for training. If we were to get a cohort of schemes together in the training hub and if we were to identify our people within them, with three or four people who want to follow one course and three or four people on my scheme who want to follow another course, all of them together, we would probably get a critical mass of 20 people who want to do seven or eight different but similar courses. Then we could contact the ETBs and tell them we have 20 potential participants in a CE scheme for three years to follow a fitness course or a coaching course, as Deputy Paul Donnelly mentioned. That would be the benefit of having training hubs created for CE schemes working together. Training is of huge importance to CE. It is what differentiates it from the other labour activation schemes. It is something we pursue, but we feel we are pursuing it with our hands tied behind our backs because of the lack of resources given to us to achieve it. The ETBs provide a few core component courses, but if we stray in any way from those we are into big money because we are going into private providers. The cheapest course we will get will be about €350 per module. Something as specific as health and fitness or strength and conditioning would be approximately €850 per module. Scheme participants would never accrue a €850 allowance over three years of CE, never mind managing to get enough for seven or eight modules of such a course.