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

With regard to CE, Tús and RSS, but CE and Tús in particular, the job market is in a good place and that means the people who previously were not getting employment and might have looked at CE are looking at employment. That is good, and it is the way we want it to be, but it puts pressure on organisations that are dependent on CE places. At the moment, we have 18,750 people in CE places, which leaves us with 2,382 vacancies. I feel this gives us an opportunity. I agree that when we have the unemployment rate pushed down, it exposes what we need to do for those people who have struggled long-term to find employment. It opens up opportunities to get people out of the rut they have been in for a while, and CE is in a good place to do that. We have been looking at ways of adapting it in order to get to those people who previously would not have thought of it before. Qualified adults are now eligible and we are getting people on those payments into CE as well. We are also looking at those on disability allowance, although we have to do that sensitively because it is an option for some but simply not an option for others. More Ukrainians are also coming onto CE.

We need to push down into the live register and see who we can help. If there are ways in which we are not supporting people, we need to adapt and do that. I believe CE can do that. We have adapted it in a number of ways over the last two years and we are open to doing that again. We need to do wider promotional work on community employment. Many of us in the niche community sector understand and appreciate what community employment can do, but there is a broader piece of work that I have been pushing internally in the Department and we need to get it out there, at a wider level, with regard to the value of CE and what it can do for people. It is extraordinary and we have all seen the cases. I visit projects monthly and there is always someone whose life has been turned around by getting into CE. We need to get that awareness of the power of CE out there a lot more.

With regard to Tús, we are trying a couple of different things. We have looked at a small area, for example, and we are literally contacting everyone in that small area who is eligible for Tús to see what the feedback is and whether we can replicate that more widely.

The Deputy will be aware that the rural social scheme is under review at the moment and farm assist is the basis for that. We have been pushing farm assist as a way of reinvigorating the rural social scheme, and we have been asking key stakeholders on the ground to tell people about farm assist. I do not know if that is having an impact as we do not have direct evidence of it, but maybe the figures indicate that is the way it is going. Certainly, with the RSS review coming to its closing stages, we need to keep everything on the board in terms of how to keep life in the scheme going forward because it does amazing work. We want to keep small farmers on the land and it is a key way of doing that. Those are some initial responses.