Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will try to touch on the other points that were made. There is a broad range of people who are on CE schemes at the moment. I take the Deputy's point on that. The broad qualifying criteria for most of them is the jobseeker's allowance. That is where the call is made as to whether someone could theoretically be eligible for employment. It is at that stage the call is made. I would be very slow to say to anyone that they will never be able to get a job in the real labour market. We have to be very careful about doing that. Notwithstanding the point the Deputy made, there are a lot of people who are very distant from it but it is when the application is made for jobseeker's allowances that that key decision is made. It is worth saying as well that there are flows in both directions between CE and Tús. It can work well for people going in both directions. Those are just some initial comments. We would be wise to take the wisdom of the broadest group of stakeholders we can when looking at RSS because I want to go back to basics and see what we can do to keep small farmers on the land.