Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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I think what Deputy Ryan has said summarises the heart of the issue and how it goes forward. I could give him a couple of examples. The OECD would be involved in this as well. I draw members' attention to the summary of the notes on Vote 37 - the output table, note No. 18. It is Department item No. 64. This goes back to Deputy Ó Snodaigh's point about processing times.

When all of us in this Dáil term came into office, the economy had just crashed through the floor. There were vast volumes of additional people who, unfortunately, had become unemployed. Some 330,000 people lost their jobs and many self-employed people lost their businesses. We know all that and I do not want to go into it. The processing times would then have been under severe pressure.

One of the decisions I took early on, as those involved with the committee will remember, was to invest in IT. It was a pretty high-risk, 50-50 decision. Members will remember our discussions about the domiciliary care allowance, carers and a number of benefits like that. The documents were in the offices in Longford. A lot of them were in envelopes on the floor and we decided we were going to put them all up on the IT system. For me as Minister, that meant three to six months of changeover, which was roughly the time we estimated. It became very difficult because as all the stuff was taken off the floor and put onto the system, processing time was being lost for the applications. We then did what a lot of Deputies at the time were a bit annoyed about. The easiest thing once we got the system up was to process the new, fresh applications and then get through the backlog.

That is ancient history now and the processing times are much better, coming from where we have in terms of the IT system. We have more to do because a lot of IT platforms in Ireland - I know the Deputy has a lot of expertise in this area - go back maybe 20 years and have been added to, patched and so on. I would suggest that the Department should ultimately be moving online. That would mean once people's data were complete, the processing time for the applications would reduce even further. That is a strategic policy decision.

In the context of New Zealand, there are a couple of different ways of looking at social welfare aims and objectives.

I said earlier that the objective of the Government was to get people back into employment. The route for some people is through education, training, community employment and shorter-term schemes such as Tús and Gateway. However, if one was to rely exclusively on the New Zealand model, one of the immediate contraindications would be that if one went back to school or college through the back-to-education process, with which most members are familiar, one would almost inevitably be taken out of job searching during that process, whether it was associated with an access or a degree programme. What I describe is socially very valuable to the whole of Irish society but one might not get full marks from the OECD for doing so because it would state people were being taken out of the intensity associated with a job search. I refer to the experience of community employment, of which Deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh has been a strong champion. It is like the chicken and the egg. I do not believe the OECD or New Zealand has yet clarified the matter.

What is social employment? On the one hand, social employment and social occupation give people an opportunity to participate in their own community, of which I am an absolute champion. However, people who come from the troika and so on are saying it involves time taken from a work search and ask why we are doing it. I am saying it is because a community scheme such as that in the SOLAS centre in Headford or one in Ballyfermot is not just about outputs but also about the very considerable contributions made by people to their local community.

To answer the question, I have tried to get into the matter at length. If one is talking about it from a scientific and academic perspective and a perspective based purely on output, one must find a means of marrying the output measurements with the social and human implications of what one is doing. At this point, I do not have a perfect answer because, in a certain sense, we might agree that we should do both. That is what the Department has tried to do. I will absolutely welcome any recommendation the committee makes based on its deliberations, but I want to see both sides of the coin. Deputy Michael Conaghan represents Ballyfermot and Inchicore, as does Deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh. Other members represent rural areas which include small and medium-sized towns as their key bailiwicks. Deputy Brendan Ryan is beside Dublin Airport and, although it is in my constituency, he represents it-----