Mr. John Stewart:

I will deal first with Deputy Ryan's question on staff with good interpersonal skills being appointed to front-line roles. We gained a sense that Intreo office managers are aware of this matter. The members of staff of any organisation will possess a range of skills and abilities. It is often the case that an unemployed person attending at an Intreo office will be anxious, apprehensive and concerned about his or her entitlement to a payment, the period he or she will be unemployed, etc.

It is important that when people seek to access the service, the person they meet has the necessary skills to deal with them effectively. He or she should be able to demonstrate empathy with people's situations and should be able to communicate clearly what the person needs to know and do and what his or her options are. Some of the feedback we have got from unemployed people we have met is that this has not been the case in every situation. There were some examples in which, unfortunately, officials did not demonstrate the level of interpersonal skills required. It was also recognised within the report and by the people who applied for assistance that the staff in these organisations are under significant pressure and dealing with significant numbers of people. Nonetheless, this does not excuse circumstances or situations in which people do not receive the type of service they expect to receive. This, essentially, is what the particular recommendation sought to address.

In regard to the call for more effective collaboration, the ETBs were just being formulated at the time we were doing the research, from April 2013 to April 2014. In a way, this was a call to ensure that when the new ETBs were up and running there would be collaboration between the Intreo service, the ETBs and other providers to ensure that opportunities for people to participate in education training programmes are maximised.

On the point made by Deputy O'Dea in regard to square pegs and round holes, this is a critical point. As we have seen from research we have done, it is vital that work be done to ensure that when somebody is referred to an educational training programme or to a job, there is a fit between the person and the programme, the course or the job. This is critical, particularly in the context of employer engagement. Without that fit, we could quite quickly undermine the service through not ensuring the key element of job matching. The Deputy made a good and relevant point on that.