Dr. Peter Rigney:

The only issue in bringing the self-employed into the social welfare system concerns the price point as they are both employer and employee. That is a high premium to pay. One can also declare one is unemployed at particular times. These issues all lead to a debate about the price point.

On Deputy Catherine Byrne’s point about apprenticeships, there is a gender problem. There are problems with young men. What works better for them is a programme that links them with the workplace. As teachers will inform us, they will not give the same amount of guff - for want of a better word - in the workplace as they do in the classroom. We need to find out which programmes work, evaluate and replicate them. One cannot run programmes without evaluating them. It is not a question of money going astray but of evaluating the opportunities in terms of what one could do better with the money if it were spent in a better way.