Professor Mary Murphy:

I will address the latter part of what the Deputy spoke about. I have many practical examples, since I spent the past three years looking at the public employment services and at how narrow the model of public employment services, PES, is. It is focused on quick progression into the first job. It is coupled with a conditional welfare system that makes people go in that direction. We have argued for and given detailed proposals for a thing called the model of enabling employment guidance, MEEG, instead of PES. Enablement refers to the concept that services wherever a citizen comes to the system, whether in the ETB, the Department, Intreo, JobPath, and local employment services, should be able to enable them to navigate their lives. The services should provide navigational agency and give them the tools to step back. They can say that they were construction workers but if somebody would discuss it with them, they would consider doing something different if given the space and time to figure out what it means, instead of being told that it has been advertised, that they can get the job tomorrow and then the service can meet its target and everything will be fine.

There are clear proposals about reorienting public employment services more generally in a labour market that will change all the time, with artificial intelligence and with climate transition. A number of jobs will be emptied out because of their sustainability impact. and we will be creating new forms of employment. Citizens have to be enabled to manage that transition. It requires a new take on our institutions in order that they are more enabling, adaptable and flexible than we allow them to be. Workers in a local employment service will say that they have to do what the computer states and that it says "No" to them. The conversation they are allowed to have with the claimant is narrow and demands immediate action. It is about getting onto the next bus; not about telling people about the superb opportunities to reskill, retrain, rethink and reimagine who they could be in the next 40 years. The work has been done in that regard and there are ideas about how to change those systems to make them better.

There are many examples of other countries with better guidance systems, both in adult education and the labour market programmes, which have a wider view of how one can enable people to get into the right space and to understand how the future will shift. Obviously, we do not know this fully but we have enough information about sectors that might diminish or those that might grow, as well as what we might need to orient people towards.