Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 25 May 2022
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection
Community Employment Programme: SIPTU
Mr. Gabriel Kearney:
The answer is "Yes" and "No". We have the capacity if we are going to pursue the chosen model, instead of the one that Deputy Ó Cuív spoke about where we can put our numbers that are not activating into deployment, and if we can increase our number of, say, the younger cohort - I should not say that about a certain age but I think we all know what this means for people who are over 55 and older people. If we cannot attract young people to train, then we cannot do the activation and we cannot do the things we were set up to do. In that case, we must get bigger numbers, as we have requested. As I mentioned earlier, we requested more numbers. We gave a presentation to the organisations for bigger numbers but we were bogged down in paperwork to achieve that and I pulled away from that, as I could not do it. The numbers are there but it is very hard to get them. Like everything else, there is a prohibitive amount of red tape involved.
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