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

On Tús, CE and the RSS, will the pension rate that is now applied to CE apply to Tús and RSS supervisors? It would be totally anomalous if not.

It was stated that there are vacancies in the context of the RSS. Is there any data as to the number of people on the RSS before and after 2014, by family formation? Before 2014, a person got the full payment, irrespective of the type of farm they owned, as long they were qualified to go on the scheme. In other words, a person would have had to be eligible for some farm assist, but once a person was on it, as long as their income did not suddenly expand, they got the full payment. After 2014, that changed. A person got the basic single-rate payment, or where there were a couple with dependent children, they then took from the amount of payment above that from the farm income. What that meant was that for single people going on the RSS, it was as attractive as ever. They got the full €230 or whatever per week. However, for a couple with children with a farm income, they potentially only got the top-up, that is, the €20-odd top-up per week. If the figures are examined, it will be found that after 2014, the people who joined were, in the main, were single. It became totally unattractive for people who had partners, dependent children or dependents to go on the scheme. If the Government wants to make the scheme attractive and return it to its original roots, the simple thing to do would be to reverse the means test meanness of 2014 that undermined the whole principle of the scheme. The principle of the scheme and the European policy at the time were to keep families on the land. This was how there could be full-time farmers who were nearly on the scheme full-time. Most farmers - either themselves or their spouses - can give 19 hours a week.

It would be interesting to go back and get the figures. If an analysis could be done of the make-up of the people who joined after 2014, would it be disproportionately single people with no dependants? Did a different mix apply pre-2014? I think 2014 was the year the rules were changed.

I welcome the idea of reviewing Tús and RSS. The Ministers said they were going to talk to stakeholders. There are two points I would like to make. First, we should have a special consultation, as a committee, before the report is written. I do not think we should have to go into the public consultation. It is a terrible thing when we get the final report and then the Department has a consultation with us but we do not really have an input at that stage. The collective wisdom of the people who are doing the clinics is often more valuable than vested interest stakeholder groups. I am not saying anything against them but they are coming from a particular objective. I often find that recommendations coming from groups like that miss what we are picking up on the ground, the day-to-day realities of how these things work out on the ground.

I also suggest flipping CE and Tús. If a long-term unemployed person were to go on a community scheme, it would first be seen as an activation scheme. They would get all these opportunities of education and whatever and in some cases they get activated and get a job. However, the practising politicians here know there is a fair number of people who will do quite good work on a CE or Tús scheme but who will never be commercially employed. There is a massive difference between the two. I had experience before politics in employing people in both schemes simultaneously in the community work I was doing. The idea of Tús was that it was for people who were not likely to jump out by activation but were still capable of making a contribution to society and keeping all these communities going. That is what these people are doing, at a very small extra expense to the State, by jumping from there into Tús. It was the Department of Finance that flipped it and put the one-year cap on it. It therefore keeps people engaged who are very unlikely to get employment. Anybody who tells me there are not people you could train and educate forever who are unlikely to ever hold a commercial job, they might as well have told me that if I got enough lessons I would be able to play music. I cannot. I wish I could. There are lots of things people cannot do and there is nothing wrong with them.