Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

In implementing the Youth Guarantee, a number of different initiatives have been put in place. Our plan was one of the early ones accepted by the European Commission. We have done a number of different things, such as developing the Intreo process to ensure earlier and more intensive engagement with young people, delivering additional opportunities to young people through education and training programmes, earmarking a quota of places and opportunities on employment schemes for young people, and varying the eligibility conditions for access to these schemes so that young people can access them at an earlier stage in unemployment than other people on the live register can. We have expanded the number of opportunities availed of in the form of internships, subsidised private sector recruitment and supports for self-employment, and introduced new options for young unemployed people in the area of youth entrepreneurship and international work experience and training. There has been an uptake of more than 25,000 across all of those different programmes. A specially developed internship for the most disadvantaged and the provision of recruitment subsidies for young unemployed people were launched in quarter one of 2015. Those are additional components of the Youth Guarantee.