Mr. John McKeon:

We have had a look at it and at a number of individual cases. I cannot recall the one concerning Údarás na Gaeltachta but perhaps we examined that as well. In all of those cases, there were people available who were either on the live register or long-term unemployed and who could have been referred to the community employment base. When we tease it out, the difficulty is that we probably need to have a different model of engagement between the people on our long-term unemployed register and the community employment companies in order to get more of the people who are not currently aware of or applying for community employment schemes to apply.

One can contrast it with Tús, for example, which is a very similar scheme. However, the difference with Tús is that people are selected by the Department and referred to community employment. Conversely, community employment sponsors advertise their positions and then wait for applicants. This falls to the Department and it is something at which we are looking. We need to be a little bit more active in talking to the 40,000 people who are long-term unemployed and not on any other schemes at the moment and telling them that the vacancies are there and encouraging them to apply.

There is another difficulty, which is a little bit difficult to say because it runs against my own personal grain a bit but, nevertheless, I think there is evidence for it. For community employment businesses, or certainly the one or two cases I looked at when I scratched beneath the surface, the problem was not so much that they could not get people. Rather, they could not get the right calibre of person or the exact person that they wanted in the same way they could in 2012. I am just saying in the one or two cases I am speaking of-----