Mr. George Ryan:

FIT has been working for ten years or more as partner to organisations in other EU countries. In fact, we have developed more European projects than any other organisation in Ireland and have led 15 or so of them in recent years. Most of these projects were in the education and training space and it was the Directorate General of that area which awarded the funding. However, it should be borne in mind that FIT's message is really about employment. There is an education and training dimension, which needs support, but we are primarily about helping people to find jobs. In that context, we have worked with the Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities in recent years to try to get the message across that FIT is really about the employment outcome.

The funding for the programme the Chairman mentioned, which is really about spreading the FIT model to other countries, including Portugal, Greece, Spain, Latvia and Lithuania, came from that particular Directorate General. The outgoing Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, Mr. László Andor, wrote to FIT in his last year in office to say he believed in what we are doing and that we must get this message out to other countries. As is always the case when it comes to EU funding, one must compete; nothing is never handed out. We had an opportunity to apply for funding to spread the FIT model and were successful in that application. This came in the wake of the pledge FIT gave at a meeting of the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs of our intention to do so. We made that pledge two years ago and followed it up with the hard work of putting in a proposal, applying for funding and engaging with partners in other countries. The first partner meeting took place in Rome, probably around the same time the Chairman was there. That programme is now off the ground.

It may be our sixteenth EU programme and we have many partners all over Europe. We are particularly pleased with this as it replicates the FIT model and after it has been piloted by these five countries we hope to extend it to a broader range of countries.