Mr. Terry Corcoran:

I will make a general point about the Youth Guarantee and whether there is a strategy and so on. The policies being followed aim towards the most important objective, which is to get people back into jobs. That is the largest single element of the Government's policies in this area. Obviously, there is a good deal of evidence, with falling unemployment and rising employment, that this part of the plan is working.

The other element of the guarantee implementation plan was the issue of substantial engagement with the newly-unemployed young jobseekers. The resources for that are being delivered in part by the use of local employment services. Increasingly, they are being delivered by the movement to JobPath, which is releasing resources inside the Department to undertake more detailed engagement with young jobseekers at the beginning of their unemployment spell. That was done in this case as well.

What happened in terms of unemployment in Ballymun? It is important to note that it is unlike the overall process planned for the Youth Guarantee relating to engaging with newly-unemployed young people. Given the scale of the resources deployed in Ballymun, every young person on the live register, regardless of duration, was approached during a brief period. This was done comprehensively in a way that could not be done nationally - the resources simply would not be available. That was part of the impact.

While unemployment may have risen a little during this year for young people in Ballymun, there are seasonal elements at play. Unemployment is still down year on year in Ballymun. It is down by 9% on the same period last year. It is not down by as much as it was at the turn of the year, but, in part at least, that is to do with the fact that we had a major engagement with all young people on the live register and a significant programme provision was made. Those people cannot stay on programmes forever. We cannot go on repeating those processes with the same people over and over. The return of people to the register from those programmes is part of the reason it has not been declining as rapidly as before compared to the rest of the country.