Mr. Mick Creedon:

Maybe, but it is not just that ratio issue. It was because other things were done during the pilot. For example, they changed the eligibility for the community employment, CE, schemes purely for people coming through the pilot. They reduced the age to 20, I believe, and that was hugely successful because it enabled young people to access CE schemes that they were denied previously. That has ended again, so that option is not available. They did the same with the Tús programme.

Through the pilot there was also a flexible fund which allowed us to support people to access PLC programmes. Before we took any of the intake into the pilot the agencies worked together to come up with a local plan as to how it would all work, and it was not a case of one size fits all. We did an analysis of the young people in the area in terms of their education levels, experiences and the barriers they faced. We then tried to offer specific options to those three target groups. It is a combination of all of those, namely, the inter-agency working, the links we had developed and built with the youth services, the education and training services and the employers and our capacity to try out new things . All of that combined-----