Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentation. I welcome some of the recent changes. They are definitely incremental steps in the right direction. However, I will say, as would all my colleagues, that it is still probably too little. The witnesses might be able to tell me how many people are long-term unemployed. In other words, how many people have been on jobseeker's allowance for longer than one year? It is fine to say the unemployment rate is 4.5% and that we have full unemployment but the subtext of this is that all of the commercially employable people are employed. It does not mean there is not a large cohort of people who are long-term unemployed and that the system has said employers will not employ these people. We need to look at this figure and then ask why there are vacancies on community employment schemes and Tús schemes. Full employment is defined as 4.5% unemployment and many of these people are long-term unemployed.

I welcome the slight shift I have heard in the statement today. I have been in politics since 1994. Since the schemes were introduced, there has been an argument that they are purely activation schemes and the fact they provide a service to the community is an accidental incidental of temporary employment. There are now two recognised aims of the schemes. These are activation and providing vital services. Many of the services provided in rural areas through community employment, Tús and rural social schemes are provided in cities by paid full-time employees, such as in public parks and public areas.

There should be three equal aims to the schemes. One is activation and I have nothing against activation for community employment schemes and Tús but the rural social scheme is different. The second aim is to provide services. The third is to provide useful occupation from long-term unemployed people who are unlikely to get commercial employment but can make a contribution. When I was in the Department, Dr. Clem Leech was its chief medical officer. He gave me a simple one-page note that showed the devastating effect on people's health of unemployment and being unemployed. It has an effect on morbidity and mortality. They go to the doctor more frequently. I would love to see a move whereby we recognise three equal aims to the schemes rather than them having the primary aim of activation, a subsidiary aim of services and no emphasis on the long-term unemployed. This is where the issue of the cap on the number of years arises.

On a big policy level, does the Department wonder why community employment is there and why we have Tús? Does it ever ask what is the purpose of it and why people can go straight from the live register to Tús and community employment? Does it ever ask what this is all about? Does it ask whether it is rational? The structure of Tús schemes is the result of the insistence of the Department of Finance at the time. They were not the creation of the Department with responsibility for social protection. The idea put forward at the time was that people would go on a community employment scheme as a training activation scheme. If people did not graduate from it, they would graduate to Tús and there would be no time limit.

I remember it was 2010. The scheme was taken, as amended, in a crisis. Does the Department accept it is time now to look at the big picture and to have a much more coherent policy such that there is intensive activation and so on and a lot of money is spent on training, but that if that does not work after, say, three years, the person is not thrown back onto the scheme he or she was on or kept in training? Even if such people are unlikely to get employment, what they need is an employment scheme such that they graduate to that and there is no time limit. This should be put into a totally rational picture. Has there been any talk in the Department of looking at that? If the Department digs out the files, it will find some interesting answers in them as to how this rather bizarre situation arose and how it did not arise because of the Department but, rather, arose in an absolute crisis. We got the scheme with conditions, and the conditions the Department of Finance put on it at the time were totally irrational, but better half a loaf than no bread. It is time now, however, after 12 years, to look at the scheme, to pause for a second and to ask if this was what it was designed to do or how this rather odd situation arose.

RSS is not an activation scheme because the people on RSS already have jobs. They are farmers. That is a condition of the scheme. That leads to a number of questions. Will the witnesses tell us in their reply how many people are on farm assist? That is crucial because, as far as I know, it might be about 5,000. It is certainly down on the figure during the economic crisis. I do not believe there ever was a justification for the six-year cap. The scheme was working fine without it. Whatever justification there was for it at the time, if the Department were to make the scheme an on-demand scheme, and there are people on farm assist who will not go onto RSS for whatever reason, there will not be a flood of people into the scheme because they are just not on farm assist. That is, I think, where 90% of the Department's RSS participants come from. The six-year rule is not required anymore. The scheme already has a number of vacancies. It has 3,350 places; it has only 2,800 participants. As Deputy Kerrane said, even allowing that 400 of them are over 60, that is still a difference of 1,000 people, and I do not know where the Department will find them. The Department should forget about reviews. Will somebody not make a decision without a big external review in some Department? Can we not go back to the days when civil servants and their Ministers made decisions on the obvious and did not keep putting everything back into a review? Can we not move on with that?

The next problem I wish to raise is a huge one. If the Department were to look at the number of people with dependent children or adults on their farm assist payments going onto RSS as a percentage of the total available pool, I would say it would find it to be much smaller than the number of single people. The reason for that is that if I am a single person, no matter what my farm income is, as long as I am eligible for €1 of farm assist, I will get the full payment, including the top-up. If, however, I have a dependent adult, all I get is €22 or €23 for 19.5 hours' work. The rest is clawed back off my farm income. Very few people would think it a great idea to work 19.5 hours for €22. That was another 2017 rule that came in. The scheme was working attractively.

Somebody once described this syndrome as follows. You sometimes meet people about whom it is said that if you were down in a hole, they would pull you out of it, but that if you started climbing a ladder, they would push you down again. It seems to me there is a bit of that involved in the way this works in that if you are really down in the hole, yes, the Department of Social Protection tends to pull you out, but if you start climbing the ladder, between means-testing and the rule that the Department will give you €22 if you give it 19.5 hours' work, the Department pushes you down again when you start getting on and might have a slightly better lifestyle. It was attractive to couples with children to go onto the scheme because they could keep their farm income as long as it was not too big. There was a limit on the income they could have. They had to be eligible for farm assist. When that was happening, small and medium-scale farmers found it possible to stay in full-time farming with the scheme and to put their children to school, to college and so on. That was a major contribution to society. I remember saying at the time that it was a much better focused expenditure of State money, of public money, because it helped that cohort of farmers, than all the grants they were getting because those are indiscriminate and give the multimillionaires the same amounts they give the people at the bottom. Then we got mean and cut them. Are there any thoughts on going back on that decision?

Ms Hurley said these schemes cost €112 million, €375 million and €52 million. Will she tell me how much it would cost if all these people went back onto their basic payments? My memory is that between, say, a Tús and an RSS scheme, the difference is something like €5,000 per participant. Those schemes are in the Department of Social Protection, so if it were to scrap all the schemes, it would not save €375 million, €112 million and €52 million because the costs of other schemes in the same Department would go up. One of the reasons the schemes were put into the Department of Social Protection was that the internal argument between Departments would be ended and the Minister for Social Protection could go to the Minister for Finance, or the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, as he is now, and explain to him or her that an extra thousand places costs not a gross cost but only a net cost because 1,000 people will be lost from farm assist, jobseeker's allowance or whatever other payment they are on. Again, maybe the witnesses could tell us the real, net cost of the schemes, not their gross cost.

Speaking of rationalisation, Tús and RSS work on the basis that there are, I think, 30-odd companies involved. CE still operates on a much different basis in that every company is independent. There are 800 companies, 800 audits and 800 supervisors with massive employment responsibilities that grow every day, all under voluntary committees, whereas Tús and RSS are managed centrally from the point of view of employment responsibility by the partnership companies, which are professional companies. The wages are paid from Clifden by Pobal, and the local committee decides what work needs to be done and dusted. That can involve day-to-day supervising or work in liaison with the sponsoring company to arrange that. It seems to me to be a better arrangement. It seems to me there could be significant exposure from those 800 companies all being independent. Many of them have voluntary committees. That is a huge and unnecessary burden on them. It would be much better to have the employment arrangement of Tús and CE, whereby the heavy employment responsibilities are on a more central body and there are shared services for paying out the salaries.

I wish to speak about carer's allowance and the new approach to the hours for farmers. I could say many things about carer's allowance but I will focus only on farmers. Full-time care and attention is very hard to define. For example, if you have an old person or a disabled child in your house, they may go to bed at 10 o'clock at night and not get up most days until 8 a.m., but you are tied to being there. If they need to go to the toilet or need anything in the night, you have to be there. There might be nights when they will not call you; there might be nights when they will.

Are they eligible hours? Somebody else could go away for the weekend if they were not caring and leave an adult behind or whatever. With a child who is not disabled, you could get an ordinary babysitter in, however, that is not possible with a disabled child. Again, with the farmer, a similar thing happens. Many elderly persons would not be able to go to the toilet on their own because physically they could not get out of the chair. They could not perform other bodily functions, as they call them. However, if often happens that a person like that might have their lunch and then go to the toilet or whatever, and you might be able to leave them. You might be able to work by mobile phone and be able to leave them for an hour or two or three to go a few fields down, do your work and be on call. However, you could not go off for the day or be at full-time employment, because you would have to be on call all the time. Is that full-time care and attention? Are they care hours? On the forms at the moment it is not very clear if they are care hours. We are trying to mathematise very human situations and box them out into very kind of fixed chunks when caring for somebody is not like that. You are trying to make up these hours. Would somebody write a little menu of the eligible hours? I would imagine that if you are tied to and in the house and the person is asleep, you still have to be there if you are on call all night. Whether they do not get up, get up once or five times, you are still there. I will eave it at that.