Ms Nuala Whelan:

Senator O'Donnell asked a question about when we will know if the pilot is working in Ballymun. We have local and national implementation teams led by the Department of Social Protection. That has been happening over the past few months and there has been much planning going into the process. Towards the end of this month we will start to engage with young people in the area. There are 750 young people in Ballymun who fit into the pilot and we anticipate that this number will rise to approximately 1,000 by the end of the pilot. There is an evaluation built into the pilot and the Department of Social Protection is going through the contract process. The tender is out. We hope that will be a formative type of evaluation that will run with us through the pilot.

We have much experience in doing this with a general range of clients and we always track or monitor the work, trying to identify lessons. Many of the methods and interventions in this pilot are based on very good lessons learned from previous projects. We know they work and now we can see what kind of impact will be made on younger client groups.