Ms Roshin Sen:

Designing policy to reach the furthest behind is the primary focus of the roadmap for social inclusion because that is aimed at making Ireland one of the most socially inclusive countries in the EU and reducing consistent poverty to 2%. The focus there is very much on looking at different strands, including older people, families and communities, to be able to see what actions would be necessary to make sure that people can participate fully in society. That is the primary focus of the roadmap in its thinking. As part of the mid-term review, we have asked people in the public consultation, and are ourselves considering, what the key issues on which we need to focus are.

As to what we will implement in the coming years, we are doing a mid-term review at the moment. That looks at what the priority is over the next two years and the lifetime of the roadmap out to 2025. That is very much at the forefront of our thinking at the moment. Similarly, within Pathways to Work there is a specific strand called "Working for All - Leaving No One Behind", which is also the theme of Ireland's voluntary national review of the sustainable development goals. That looks at particular groups that we know are under-represented in the labour market and face disadvantage in trying to access and to sustain employment. The review has a number of different actions in respect of young people - at the time Pathways to Work was being developed, the youth unemployment rate was extremely high as a consequence of the pandemic - as well as members of the Traveller community, lone parents and people with disabilities, so there are a number of different actions there. There are also people who could be experiencing discrimination.

Similarly, we are also doing a mid-term review of Pathways to Work. The public consultation on that is open at the moment until the end of March. We asked people specifically about looking at these groups who are under-represented and face disadvantage. We asked people if they had suggestions for actions that could help support people into employment. That is another one of the key focuses of Pathways to Work. One of its aims was to help people recover as we recovered from the pandemic and to get back into work, but there are also those people who were already experiencing disadvantage.

As for maintaining strengths, the format of Pathways to Work looks holistically at the overall public employment services and employment services across government. It looks at the supports available to jobseekers to improve the public employment services. Pathways to Work has been operating for a number of years now, and this is the latest iteration of the strategy. We are always refining and improving what we can do in respect of the public employment services. We also look at how we work with employers to encourage the recruitment of people who are more disadvantaged in the labour market and to make them aware of the various supports that are available to take on people they might otherwise not consider employing. We also look at the welfare system as a whole to make sure that it pays for people to work and that they will be better off. We also make sure that the work we do is evidence-based. We therefore have a number of different strands, including the "Working for All" strand. The systems we have in place have proven to be very effective so far, but we are always refining them over time.

Progress is being made on the SDG targets for which we are responsible. A European semester country report was published last year which looked at all the different EU member states and how they are performing. I think it was published at the end of the year. On each of the SDGs for which we have responsibility, namely, SDG 1 on poverty, SDG 8 on employment and SDG 10 on income inequality, we are performing above the EU average and making good progress.