Michael Conaghan (Dublin South Central, Labour)
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I welcome the delegation. I want to raise an issue about education and training. Obviously, nothing beats having a job, especially if it is reasonably well-paid and draws on a person's skills. Nothing is more satisfying. There are benefits to social interaction in the workplace as well. However, in the absence of that there is a role for education and training and I wish to explore this aspect of the whole equation.

These are important interventions in the lives of people who are not working. Perhaps they do not have the skills, equipment, competence or whatever. Let us consider what the former vocational education committee colleges have been doing. They have taken several initiatives in recent years. In Dublin, many of them are situated in working class areas where there are high levels of unemployment, including Ballyfermot, Inchicore, Finglas and Crumlin. It is interesting to consider a profile of the interventions in this regard. I was wondering if any evaluation or assessment has been done. I have been struck by the number of people who would never have thought of themselves as likely to go to college. They flock to these places, which are packed to overflowing. Luckily, many of the colleges are drawing on people from the local community and people come out of the colleges with a significant enhancement of their personal sense of themselves, quite apart from new skills and so on.

I know the colleges have been assessed in the sense of people getting certificates and doing examinations and so on. However, has there been any objective assessment by groups like the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed, which has an interest in being able to quantify what works, what is effective, where the most effective interventions are happening and how to marry job preparation with educational and various other skills, as well as how to make a more creative intervention in people's lives? It is not simply about jobs, although jobs are very important. It is probably in the nature of the VECs that they have changed and developed, depending on the challenges in the wider working community and environment and they have done this successfully. Perhaps that might be of interest in terms of the results the INOU has for quantifying the success of such interventions. Has anything like that been done? It might be worth considering.